


What Makes Us

by merlinsearlobe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Emotional Infidelity, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, Marauders, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Romance, Slow Burn, Time Travel, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2019-08-20 15:01:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 37,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16557971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merlinsearlobe/pseuds/merlinsearlobe
Summary: Remus' face was at once heartwrenchingly familiar and unsettlingly young. He did not know her yet, this Remus. He had seen her at once, however, and now he glanced at her, a question in his tired eyes.Hermione finds herself trapped in the past––or something like it. There, she meets a young, deeply lonely Remus Lupin. The two of them quickly grow close, unaware of the efforts being made to bring Hermione back into her own reality...





	1. Constant Vigilance

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I'm cross-posting both here and at ff.net. This ao3 version will have more free rein when it comes to explicit scenes.

_Like him that travels, I return again;_

_Just to the time, not with the time exchanged._

 

* * *

 

**July 2000**

"Oh, go on – not even the general area?"

Hermione laughed, shaking her head. "I'm afraid not."

"Come off it," said Ron, incredulously. "It's not like we're complete outsiders, we're only bloody Aurors, aren't we?"

"Not yet," Harry reminded him. "Still got to qualify."

"Then why does she get to be an Unspeakable already? With the secrecy...everything's a secret..."

Hermione smiled a little as Ron grumbled some more, clearly very much put out that the confidentiality which bound all those who worked in the Department of Mysteries was depriving him of learning about Hermione's projects at work. Still, Hermione was glad that things had largely returned to normal between them; that they had managed to put the break-up behind them. In the immediate aftermath, it had been easy to believe that their friendship would never recover.

Presently, Harry was saying, "Well, at least we can tell you what we've been up to."

Hermione nodded, keen to hear more about their latest missions. The war had been won, but there were still Death Eaters to track. A significant number had yet to surrender. What their plan was, however, now that Voldemort was truly gone, she was not quite sure.

Harry glanced around the room before speaking; the three of them sat in one corner of the living room at The Burrow. The room had been simply but lovingly decorated for Harry's birthday gathering later that evening, but they were alone for now, taking the opportunity to catch up before the others arrived.

Harry said, "We've started tracking them closely, the Death Eaters – one of our Aurors has been following a couple of them, and now she reckons they've hatched a plan of some sort."

"What sort of plan?" Hermione looked from Harry to Ron, who jumped in.

"We think they're building some sort of device, something that'll - bring _him_ back, maybe."

"But...surely that's impossible," she said, perplexed, looking between them. "He's gone. All the Horcruxes, too. Right?"

Ron nodded. "They must be desperate, s'what I said."

"But," Harry said, "unless, it's like Tonks said, that it's about changing all that."

"Changing - you mean changing what happened?"

"Yeah," said Ron. "Like you two did, in Third Year."

"Right," Harry said. "Only, the time-turners - there aren't any more left, are there? Not after - what happened to them."

She knew he meant the battle at the Department of Mysteries that had taken place in their fifth year at Hogwarts, the battle where they'd lost Sirius.

"Right," she said, quietly, "The Ministry has none left, at least for now. But I suppose that doesn't mean that someone who really wanted one couldn't acquire one from elsewhere, or possibly try to create one themselves."

"Reckon they're trying that, then," said Ron, darkly. "Creating one. Tonks said there'd been a lot of excitement on their end. Like whatever they were planning would be ready soon, or like they'd come up with some hex-proof plan for getting there."

They were quiet for a moment. Hermione traced and retraced the rim of her now-empty mug, mulling over the possibilities, silently acknowledging the fear and anger that stirred in her stomach. They went on, the dark wizards; they kept going. Constant vigilance, ever necessary, was draining.

"Anyway, I know you can't say what you're doing," Ron grunted, breaking the somewhat morose silence, "but just a heads-up, in case they go after the time stuff in your Department."

Hermione nodded. "Thank you."

She had, in fact, been assigned to the Time Room within the Department of Mysteries, and had spent the past year working with the _infinitum_ jar - the bell jar which could cause a bird to perpetually cycle through from birth to death and back again. She had recently joined the team who worked on Time, and she had taken over the testing of the bell jar, trying to understand the way it distorted time and space, matter and energy. If the powers of the jar could be understood, if it could be harnessed - the possibilities were limitless, and also highly dangerous.

"Wotcher, birthday boy," came a bright voice. It was accompanied by a paper-wrapped package landing squarely in Harry's lap. "From me and Remus."

Harry looked up, grinning. "Thanks, Tonks!"

Tonks had sat down beside Hermione, beaming around at each of them. "Glad to see you all together, I must say."

"You've _just_ seen us two," Ron pointed out, jerking his chin at the aforementioned birthday boy.

"Nice to see _you_ , then, Hermione," said Tonks, with a wink.

"Where's Remus?" Harry asked, hefting the package in his hands.

"Got accosted by Molly."

"What d'you mean?" Ron had grabbed Harry's gift, and was now listening intently whilst gently shaking it.

"No doubt asking about kids again," Tonks grinned. "And watch it, Weasley, you'll break that before he's even opened it."

Hermione asked, amused, "She still hasn't fully accepted you're not planning on having kids?"

Tonks sighed. "I think it's just a very alien concept for her..."

Remus entered the room, looking slightly harried until he spotted Hermione and Tonks watching him with amused expressions. He chuckled then as he joined them, wishing Harry a happy birthday. The others arrived soon after him, and several hours later, after a hearty and raucous meal, everyone paid a visit to the backyard to have a look at Arthur's latest acquisitions of muggle technology. Hermione found herself examining a vacuum that had been carefully implanted in a patch of soil, as if it were some sort of stout, strange shrub.

"Haven't seen one of those in a while," observed Remus, joining her.

"You used them?"

"Oh, yes. And my mum did." He smiled. "No matter how many times my dad said he'd cover everything, spells were so much faster..."

Hermione laughed, thinking fondly of her own parents. A comfortable silence fell between them as they made their way together to the next exhibit, where Arthur had arranged an old computer on a gardening bench. Remus reached out and ran a hand over the keyboard, but before she could enquire as to his computing skills, she noticed a new scar which ran, reddish pink, across the width of his hand, and which looked as if it had only healed recently.

She inquired, tentatively, "How've you been, Remus?"

It hadn't been too long since they'd last met, but recently she hadn't quite had a chance to ask what the Order had him doing these days.

"Oh, I'm fine, Hermione." Remus flexed his hand reflexively, having noticed in turn where her attention had been caught. "This...was simply the result of a misunderstanding. I'm still visiting packs these days, but now it's just to talk, and sometimes to offer assistance to those who would like to come and try to live within wizarding society. That sort of thing."

"Oh - amazing." Hermione looked up at him, eyes bright. "I'm so glad you're doing that! And so - have you gotten started on writing your book yet?"

Remus raised his eyebrows, passing the hand which bore the new scar briefly through his hair. "Ah, you speak as if it exists already. Are you still going to push me on that?"

"Of course," she said, stoutly. "No one else can say what you have to say. And especially now, if you're talking to other werewolves who want to see what it's like living with wizards, I'm sure having a book they could read could only help."

Remus laughed as they moved away from Arthur's old computer. "You might be right," he conceded. "There has seemed to be some  _limited_ demand for reference material."

As Hermione savoured her victory, the two of them joined Tonks, Ginny, Harry and Ron in front of a large, rusty half of a tractor.

"Impressive," Remus remarked, exchanging a glance with Hermione. Then he smiled down at Tonks, who had wrapped an arm around his waist, and put his arm about her shoulders, bringing her close.

"Mum's really going to murder him this time if he doesn't get rid of this lot, now he's shown it off," said Ron, shaking his head.

Hermione laughed with the others, but found she could not shake the twinge of melancholy that nipped at her heart as she watched the two couples beside her exchange pecks and warm words. She knew that she and Ron had not made a mistake by breaking up. Nevertheless, sometimes she still found herself thinking of the past and all its memories, and once or twice had caught herself wondering, even if absurdly, if perhaps she would never meet anyone again.

What she needed, she thought, was simply more time.


	2. Lull

**September 2000**

The Friday night after Hermione's birthday found her curled up on the sofa at Harry and Ginny's flat, nursing a mug of tea, whilst Ginny filled her in on what Harry had said about the latest movements of the Death Eaters. It was not exactly their favourite topic of discussion, but they knew better than to turn a blind eye, even (or perhaps especially) after Voldemort's defeat. The same could not be said for the Ministry of Magic; despite the high proportion of Order members now amongst its ranks, the Ministry was, yet again, dragging its feet on the matter of the Death Eaters.

"They put two Aurors outside my Department last month, after what Tonks heard about them wanting access to the Time instruments," Hermione said. "And now, nothing."

"What are they _thinking_?" Ginny demanded. "Letting their guard down like this––as if they don't know they're playing right into the Death Eaters' hands?"

Hermione shook her head. "I tried to say something to Clarence, but he said it was really not my place..."

Ginny fairly glowed with indignation. "Who does he think he's talking to?! As if he doesn't know what you did––what you and Harry and Ron _faced_ , in order to––"

She was interrupted in her tirade by the arrival of Harry and Tonks, and Hermione was somewhat grateful. Though of course she was thankful for her friend's anger on her behalf, it wouldn't change a thing as far as Clarence was concerned. He, Clarence, was the Head of the Department of Mysteries, and all the Rooms and divisions within it, and that was _that_. He'd taken over after the Battle there back in her fifth year, and there had been no incidents since, as he was proud to declare at every single interdepartmental meeting.

"Hermione! How's twenty-one treating you so far?" Tonks winked, leaning against the back of the sofa. "Sorry again I had to miss your dinner. Do you girls want to come back to mine and I'll whip us something up?"

Hermione exchanged a glance with Ginny, and instantly regretted it, because the look of sardonic horror in Ginny's eyes nearly compelled an instant burst of laughter from her. Ginny, never one to insult anyone behind their back, promptly turned the same look upon Tonks, who did burst into laughter.

"Okay, Weasley, you got me. Remus cooked. I'll serve it. Is that better?"

Ginny grinned. "Harry, you coming?"

"I would, but Ron asked me to..." Harry trailed off.

"Oh yes, Ron wants Harry to come along and help him catch a date or two tonight," Ginny said. "You don't mind, do you, Hermione?"

Now Hermione did laugh, at the expression on Harry's face. "It's fine, Harry. Honestly. You two have fun. Tell him hi for me. If that's not too weird," she added as an afterthought. "Actually, yeah, don't say hi. Not that I'm _against_ saying hi to him, I just––"

"Go, go, go," Ginny mumbled, gesturing with an ostensibly surreptitious franticness to Tonks, and Hermione cut herself off, scowling, but nevertheless following the two women to the door.

"So, no 'hi', then," Harry said, mildly. He gave Ginny a quick peck goodbye, then let go so Tonks could initiate the Apparition.

 

* * *

 

"Remus not home?" Ginny asked, some fifteen minutes later, as they tucked into a delicious charm-warmed pasta. "Mm. This is good. Lucky you."

"No, he'll be back later. Order business," Tonks added. "And yes, I'm very lucky to have him. I'd've died of food poisoning at least twice by now if it weren't for Remus."

Hermione smiled, winding a strand of saucy pasta around her fork. "I'd love a guy who could cook."

"Get you an older man, then," Ginny grinned.

She considered. "I don't think I could date anyone much older."

Tonks jumped in: "Hey!"

Hermione laughed. "No, Tonks, you, Remus, that's different! That's not what I meant. I mean those relationships where the man is much older and you can tell, you know?"

"I didn't take you to be so shallow, Granger," smirked Ginny.

"Not _physically_ ," said Hermione. "I mean where there's obviously a...power imbalance, where it's not an equal partnership. Personally, that's what I want in a relationship––an equal partner."

Tonks was nodding. "Had a friend in one of those relationships. Where she was much younger, and it was clear the guy was with her 'cause no older woman would ever put up with his shite." She made a face, hair turning a rebellious green.

"You definitely want to take your time and find someone good," Ginny said through a mouthful of pasta. "Anyone you fancy lately?"

Hermione shrugged. "Not really." She had dated a few guys after Ron, but nothing too serious.

"Well, if it helps, I can tell you how not to woo a fella," Ginny put in. "Start by not writing him a poem comparing his eyes to a freshly preserved amphibian."

After they'd devoured their share of the pasta, they regrouped in the living room, and Hermione curled up on a sofa for the second time that evening, this time accompanied by a glass of firewhiskey. She looked on contentedly as Ginny and Tonks debated the likelihood of Puddlemere United beating the Montrose Magpies in the next League match.

"The Magpies have been on a winning streak, and Puddlemere haven't exactly been on top of their game lately," Ginny was arguing.

"Yes, but the Magpies lost to the Falcons last month," said Tonks. "The _Falcons_!"

"But Puddlemere lost to Chudley, who've had an absolute crap season so far." Ginny shot Hermione an apologetic glance, then grinned. "Who d'you reckon will win the League, Hermione?"

"Er...the Holyhead Harpies," said Hermione, loyally, and Ginny laughed. Ever since Ginny had joined the Harpies, they had risen to sixth in the League, but were still rather far from the top.

"You're too kind," Ginny grinned, "but, correct answer."

Hermione reached for a bottle to refill their glasses and found it empty. "We're out," she announced. "No, no, don't get up, I'll pop round the corner and get some more. You can give me your complete League standings bets when I'm back."

She ducked out into the brisk evening air, opting to walk the short distance rather than apparate. On her way back, she saw a familiar cloaked figure approaching the house at the same time: Remus, on his way in. She waited for him, and he returned her smile as he drew nearer.

"How're you? Tonks managed to get you over for dinner?"

"Yes, thank you both," she smiled. "Delicious. Now I'm just back with some refreshments to keep the evening going." She pulled a bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey halfway out of the bag, and Remus shot her a grin of approval.

"Very nice. Did you like our present, by the way?"

The present, Hermione knew, was all his doing, because Remus and Tonks had given her a beautiful copy of _The Brothers Karamazov_ , and Remus was the only person aside from her mother and childhood best friend with whom she could discuss muggle authors.

"Perfect," she said, earnestly. "Thank you."

He looked pleased as he unlocked the door with a tap, letting them inside. "I got a whole stack of books from this little secondhand place I came across up north after my previous mission. Come have a look, and take any at all that catch your eye."

Hermione followed Remus into the dark study across the hall, propping herself against the desk and watching as he scanned the bookshelf intently with a fistful of bright flames for illumination; the warm light cast a soft glow on his face and made the blue of his eyes glimmer. He looked a little tired from the trip, but it seemed nowhere near the exhaustion that hit him once a month.

"Remus, would you rather the Order––"

But Hermione interrupted her own question as she caught sight of a muggle notebook on the desk, open to a page where Remus had been sketching out the chapters of a book. "Oh, Remus, you're writing it!"

Remus looked embarrassed, but it seemed gradually to fade in the face of her unadulterated delight. "Yes, well––I haven't shown anyone quite yet."

She nodded, looking up at once. "Oh, absolutely. Whenever you're ready."

He drew a breath, then, after a moment, said: "Ah, nevermind me. You'd be a great help, actually, Hermione. What do you think so far? I was thinking perhaps..."

They joined Ginny and Tonks in the living room afterward, bearing drinks, and as Hermione settled down again between her friends, she felt a wave of gratitude for being there with them. Time had truly passed since the end of the War, and even with the Death Eaters still out there, still active, she felt hopeful that they had made it through the worst.


	3. Welcome Back

**October 2000**

_"They'd never dare break in here."_

_"But they've done it before," argued Hermione, "and apparently they've every reason to, now."_

_But Clarence, Department Head, only frowned. "Yes, and measures were put in place after the last break-in. Aren't the Aurors on the case? I'm sure they'd warn us if it were time to start taking precautions."_

_"Yes, the Aurors, they are working on this––but I think it would be better if we also––"_

_"It's too early to place a watch on the Department," interrupted Clarence. "We have some time before it comes to that stage."_

Famous last words, Hermione thought, as she ducked behind a shelf, narrowly escaping a jet of dark orange light; it shot by and dug a smouldering hole into the wall behind her. She shot a quick _Impedimenta_ back, but the masked Death Eater pursuing her blocked the spell and darted forward again.

She shouted, " _Stupefy_!" It missed, just. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ron disarm another of the Death Eaters. The setting of this fight was unpleasantly familiar, and for a wild split-second her mind half-expected to see Sirius emerge from the shadows, trading hexes with his cousin...

"Hermione, watch out!" Tonks yelled, and Hermione sent up a shield in the nick of time, deflecting a barrage of red and gold bursts. The Death Eaters who had managed to shake their Auror tails were all headed straight toward her. After all, she reasoned, it was the _infinitum_ jar they wanted, and it was the _infinitum_ jar she was currently clutching in her arms. It was what they had come for; the key, apparently, to completing their own unrestricted time-turner. No doubt they hoped to create one which would take them back beyond mere hours––no doubt they wanted weeks, months, even years if necessary.

"Incarcerous!"

She managed, finally, to fell one of the Death Eaters, the one who was closest to her. As the ropes snaked more tightly around his ankles, she wasted no time in stunning him as well. Never leave a job half done.

But––

"Hermione! _Drop it!_ "

It was Harry's voice. She had only a split second to register it, and to wonder why on earth he, too, was telling her to give up the jar, when her vision exploded into a shower of dust-grey stars. In her hands, she felt the jar trembling as though abuzz with thousands of angry insects, but she could not see what was happening––she found she could not see anything. Just as the panic rose in her throat, a sensation like dense cotton wool fell over her, compressing her every sense, constricting her lungs. Her head was spinning, her whole dust-grey world spiralling––her knees gave out but for some unknown reason she did not fall––

She came to after several sickeningly long seconds, weak-kneed and empty-handed, but still standing. Instinctively, she fumbled for her wand, pointing it quickly at the empty space in front of her. She wondered, groggily, who had taken the jar from her; it was nowhere in sight. Then surely the Death Eaters had taken it...but there were no Death Eaters in sight, either, nor, for that matter, any Aurors or Unspeakables or any Ministry officials at all. Why, she wondered, would they have simply abandoned her here, no matter who had won the battle? And, looking around––how was everything in the Time Room perfectly in order now, after the chaos of the fight? Her eyes fell upon the rows and rows of time-turners, aligned neatly on their shelf toward her right, placid and undisturbed. And––

Wait.

Hermione looked back at the time-turners. Time-turners? How and when had they been saved from the perpetual falling to which they had been doomed ever since the battle back in her fifth year? How was it even possible that they had been so quickly saved, when the Department had had their best Unspeakables working on it for months?

She took a few tentative steps toward the entrance of the Time Room, then stopped dead when she caught sight of a familiar blue-and-green sparkle.

The _infinitum_ jar.

There it was––unspoilt, untouched, simply sitting there in its display case. Had the Death Eaters left it? But it was what they had come for. Or, if the Death Eaters had been driven off by the Ministry, why would the jar simply have been placed back on display, as if nothing had happened, with no further concern for its protection or concealment?

A suspicion was beginning to manifest in her stomach, but it did not yet crystallise.

Hermione went to the entrance of the Time Room and pushed open the door, emerging then into the familiar corridor of the Department of Mysteries, her workplace for the last two years. She made directly for the main entrance to the Department. She met no one on the way, which lent the empty corridors an eerie chill; she kept her grip tight on her wand. Perhaps they'd done something to her, to her mind––perhaps she was seeing things that weren't there, or failing to see what was.

"Hey!"

She whirled around, the Department entrance mere feet behind her. A man in Unspeakable robes had his wand directed at her; she did not recognise him, so she immediately returned the favour. His eyes narrowed.

"Identify yourself!" He barked. His narrowed eyes roved over her own Unspeakable robes; it was clear he did not know her, either.

"Hermione Granger," she called out. "Unspeakable, Level Two."

His eyes narrowed. "How couth the caged bird sang?"

She stared at him. She recognised the cadence of a Department verification check, but had never heard of this particular one. Yet she was sure she had learnt all the checks from recent years.

Now another Unspeakable, also unrecognisable to her, joined the first man. Both men had her at wandpoint, awaiting her answer.

"I don't know that one," Hermione said clearly. She tried the most recent code: "Which door was the third?"

But the wizards scowled. "Wand down. We're taking you into custody for impersonating an Unspeakable and trespassing on private Ministry property."

Hermione wet her lips. What dark magic could this possibly be? "No, I––I just came from the Time Room. Surely you saw what just happened there."

The wizards facing her down exchanged a glance, but the first simply repeated, firmly, "Wand down!"

Hermione weighed her options. If they were Death Eaters, pretending...but if on the other hand she was no longer in...

Before she could make a decision as to whether to resist the arrest, however, she felt a wave of dizzying static wash over her, an incapacitating nerve-end pain that suffused her mind entirely. Her knees hit the floor this time, and then everything went from her.

 

* * *

  

"Ah, you're up. Welcome back."

Hermione squinted. A smiling woman was leaning over her––Hermione was laying down, she realised. In a bed. When the woman moved back, Hermione saw that she wore Healer's robes. Lifting her head, she took in the bed, the surroundings, the rest of the ward––she was in St. Mungo's.

"W-What happened?" Her words came out as a feeble croak. The Healer made a face in sympathy, handing her a promptly conjured cup of water.

"You were sent here from the Ministry for care and observation."

"Observation?"

"Yes, to see if you have any further side effects." The Healer was busy scratching something onto a piece of parchment. "Anyway, I'm glad you're awake and back with us! I'm Andrea, your Healer. I've got to run, but I'll be back tomorrow so we can have a proper chat, and in the meantime my colleagues will take good care of you."

"Side effects?" Hermione asked, quickly.

Andrea paused and turned back, no doubt to hurry on to her next patient. "Yes, it's often been the case with large-scale time travel. In all of the very few cases we've seen, at least."

Hermione must have looked as stunned as she felt, because Andrea returned to her bedside, looking sympathetic.

"How long is it? I was going to wait until you were feeling better before I took a proper history, but it might be helpful for you to have some context now."

"How long?" Hermione didn't often feel completely out of her depth, and she didn't like it.

"When did you come back from?"

So this was it, then. It was slowly dawning on her, very slowly, as if her mind had simply entirely refused to even contemplate it at first, for her own protection. Time travel. It would explain everything that had happened...everything she'd seen and hadn't seen in the Ministry.

She said, slowly, "I came...it was the year 2000."

Andrea kept her expression constant, but somehow Hermione still sensed that the answer had surprised her. The Healer shook her head gently. "And what sent you back such a long way?"

"I...don't know," Hermione said. "Or I don't remember. What...what is the year now? What's the date?" Now she felt a vague rising panic in her chest.

"You mean you didn't choose this? It's the first of November, 1981."

Hermione couldn't quite speak for a moment.

Two decades.

Whatever had happened at the battle at the Ministry, and if this wasn't all dark magic illusions or someone's very cruel idea of a joke, she had truly been transported back in time––two decades back. The next realisation struck her: how would she return? This had not been done with a time-turner. She had no idea how it had happened, except that it had involved the _infinitum_ jar.

"Please get some rest for now," said Andrea, kindly. "We'll speak again, and I'm sure the Ministry will be in touch in the days ahead."

Hermione spent the rest of the day in bed, struggling to accept the strange new seas into which she had been cast, grappling with new emotions that seem hidden behind every wave. For the most part, she was caught amidst a drowning sort of worry over how she would ever return to the present––to her present, her future. By the time the lights were put out at night for sleeping hours, her only comfort was that her head ached a little less now, and she had decided on a preliminary course of action: she would go to the Ministry for the _infinitum_ jar, and see what could be done, and go from there. After all, she had spent a year working with it. Perhaps, like the Death Eaters had sought to do, she could create an unrestricted time-turner of her own.

Cheered a little by this seed of hope, she slept.

Andrea visited her the next day just before lunch, and declared that physically she was doing much better. The side effects from significant time travel were little researched and little documented, due to a restrictive investigatory sample size, but Andrea had made her a brief list of potential resources, and given her the name of a specialist Investigative Healer at St. Mungo's.

"How long should I stay here?" Hermione asked, indicating the ward around them. She was itching to get started on doing _something_ , now, even if it was simply getting to the library and pulling out stacks of books.

"I'd say wait another day or two." Andrea examined her. "You're already looking up from yesterday, but you should build your strength a little more. Always best to be safe in these situations."

Hermione grudgingly stayed in bed until the evening. After dinner, she went for a walk around the floor, noticing in one of the wards a knot of Ministry wizards who seemed to be busy administering memory charms to multiple patients. She stopped a passing Healer, and demanded, as a Ministry wizard applied a second ' _Obliviate!_ ' to a portly muggle-dressed man, "Isn't that a little excessive?"

The Healer shook her head. "They're the poor muggles who witnessed the mass murder yesterday."

Hermione looked back at the patients in shock. It was November in the year 1981––the year Harry had been born––the year his parents had been killed, then, and the year Peter had faked his own death, framing Sirius as he went. Caught up in the complexities of her own arrival, she had not even had time to consider the time she now found herself in.

Most of the ward was now filled with mildly dazed looking muggles. Shaking her head, Hermione moved on, past their beds, passing others, until she found herself at the end of the floor. The last ward of the floor was curtained off, and a green-painted sign suspended from the ceiling warned that this section was designated for 'Dangerous Creatures and Infections'. Hermione turned to go, but a brief spark of light caught her eye through a gap in the curtains, and she approached, curious. It was one of the patients; he was lying in bed, playing with a small flame that he conjured alternatively from his fingertips and his palm. About to retreat again, Hermione's eyes caught on a very familiar-looking wand on the patient's bedside table. She knew that pattern, though she couldn't quite place it, could not quite recall just now whose wand it was reminding her of.

She looked back to the wizard, then, and froze. It was Remus.

Tired, unassuming, his dark blonde hair free of grey, Remus' face was at once heartwrenchingly familiar and unsettlingly young. She thought that he must be twenty, or thereabouts. Her breath caught in her throat, her mind running on, considering again the context of everything that had just happened here––James, Lily, Sirius, Peter. Hardly realising it, she had stepped through the divide in the curtains, but now she arrested her step. He did not know her, this Remus; he did not know her yet.

He had seen her at once, however, and now he glanced at her, a question in his tired eyes. She saw that he had a fresh scar running down his jaw and trailing dangerously onto the pale skin of his throat. But more than that, she was stricken by the deep defeat and exhaustion she felt from his gaze. It was the kind of expression with which she'd grown only too familiar, thanks to the War; the look of someone who had just lost everything.

"Hi," she said, very softly, unsure how much of everything she knew showed on her tongue. He looked at her, lifting his head a little from his pillow.

"Hello," he answered, warily.

"I'm––er, Jean." The substitution was a last-minute realisation. She also thought, suddenly, that perhaps she ought not to be speaking to him at all. Remus seemed to read all that she concealed in her guilty face, because he asked,

"Are you a Healer?"

Hermione shook her head. "No, I'm just––I'm another patient here."

Remus nodded, looking away, letting his head fall back. "You don't want to be in this part of the ward."

She looked around the darkened ward; it was just the two of them, the other three beds neatly made and empty. "I think we're fine."

He laughed, shortly, and the bitterness in it made her heart clench. "If you think so."

He did not look as if he were in any mood to talk, and Hermione nodded and quietly retreated to the other side of the curtain. She desperately ached to comfort Remus, but she did not know him; or he did not know her.

A harsh voice broke into her thoughts: "What were you doing in there?"

She startled, looking up to find an angry wizard glaring down at her. He had a pin on his robes that indicated he was Healer-in-Charge for the floor.

"Visiting," she told him, instinctively defiant to the expression on his face.

"Can you not read?" he snapped. "'Dangerous Creatures and Infections'! I've had enough of bloody idiots like you running around, nearly getting yourselves killed."

Bristling, Hermione said, "Clearly, if it were that dangerous, the section wouldn't merely be _curtained off_. And there's just one patie––"

"Just one of _them_ is enough to end your life as you know it," the Healer sneered. There was a nasty look in his eyes, as though daring her to ask him what _they_ were; what Remus was.

"I don't think," she said, shortly, though hands clenched and seething inside, "that that's a very a professional attitude to be showing your _patients_."

"Not everyone deserves a professional attitude." He leaned in, jerked his chin toward the curtain, hissed: "You'll find that sometimes, _patients_ are little more than creatures in human disguise."

"That," Hermione said, calmly, "is despicable."

"You––"

But she marched away before he could continue. Her heart was pounding despite the facade she had put up––how painful it was to witness the stigma first hand, and not even as a werewolf herself; how much Remus had already suffered, with the loss of his friends; and how little the world cared!

 

* * *

 

"One more day," said Andrea the next morning. "You can leave after breakfast tomorrow, how about that? You seem steady enough, but two decades is a long time to travel, especially accidentally."

Hermione nodded, resigned. "I've owled my Department and they've said to just come in when I'm ready."

"Excellent." Andrea smiled and patted her leg through the covers. "Try to be in bed at least part of the day."

Hermione got out of bed after breakfast, and took the same route she had walked the night before. As she passed each ward, she saw that the muggles from yesterday had been released, and the floor was mostly quiet again.

In defiance, Hermione went to the end of the floor again, clearing her throat in announcement just beyond the curtain, and hesitated, before poking her head in. Remus looked up; he was sitting in bed today, a tattered copy of the Daily Prophet on his lap.

"Morning," she said, tentatively, trying to gauge his mood. "Jean, not sure if you remember..."

"Yes, I remember," he said, and though he still did not smile, his tone was gentle, his expression less closed off than it had been the evening before, if still deeply melancholic. "I'm Remus."

"What are you in for?" It was a safe question; she'd checked yesterday, and the full moon was not for another week, so it couldn't have to do with his condition––most likely.

But he flinched nevertheless, and was slow to answer her. "I was on a mission, of sorts. I was injured."

"For the Order," she said. The Order had not been a secret during the First War, she knew. She added, "I work at the Ministry, and––I know some Order members. And I...I'm sorry, Remus."

He did not ask for what; he knew what she meant, Lily and James and Sirius. He said, eventually, his voice catching, "Thank you."

After a pause, he asked, "Did you know...?"

"Not well," she said. "Not really. But I think you..."

He nodded wordlessly. She could hardly bear to watch the despair in his blue eyes.

"Thank you," he repeated, then. When he met her gaze again, he said, "Yes, I was very––they were my closest friends." There was silence for another moment. "And then yesterday––Sirius Black––you know." There was a bitter anger in his voice now, and on his face. He looked down and Hermione's eyes fell to the newspaper in his lap. Tattered though it was, it must have been today's issue, for the cover was dominated by a photo of a young Sirius, no doubt taken when the Aurors had brought him to Azkaban. Remus' hands were curled into loose claws and she saw that he had been worrying the edges of the paper, had torn streaks and corners from it.

Her eyes followed the skin of his hands up to his forearms, each bearing scars, then jumped to find the fresh one that had claimed his throat and jaw. She realised only after a beat that she was staring, and hastily checked to see whether he had caught her looking. He had; and she found she could no more bear the look of shame and pain on a young Remus' face than she could on the Remus she had known.

"I'm sorry," she said, quickly, feeling heat threatening to rise in her neck. "I'm...they must've hurt," she finished, lamely. He only nodded, his expression carefully impassive now. He was closed off, guarded, perhaps even more so now than he had been in the future. Well, she knew him then. She wished dearly she could tell him about Sirius, and Peter, but held her tongue. She possibly ought not to be speaking to him at all, but somehow she couldn't help it. He was, she thought, the only person she knew right now.

"And you," Remus was saying, studying the floor tiles that lay between them, "why are you here?"

"I, erm...I work for the Ministry, and there was an accident. I got hurt."

"Were you at Hogwarts?"

Her eyes dropped. "Yes, but...not really, I...just came back from overseas. My parents worked..."

She could tell he knew she was being less than truthful, but he accepted her answer anyway. His secrets in exchange for hers, she thought.

"Are you an Unspeakable?"

She looked at him, startled. "Yes."

Remus smiled, then, finally, at her expression, and she felt warmed by it, basking in the way the warmth suffused her chest. He said, "Mysterious, Ministry, accident...just a guess."

"Very––"

" _Potions!_ "

Hermione jumped as someone flung the curtains open unceremoniously. She turned, half-expecting to find the thoroughly vile Healer-in-Charge, but was met with a marginally less unpleasant nurse instead, who was eyeing her suspiciously.

"Who're you?" he demanded.

"I––a friend," she said.

"Family only in here." The nurse busied himself with a collection of potions on a levitating tray.

"Er––I'll see you later," Hermione said, turning to Remus, who gave her another smile. It made his eyes lighter, and reminded her of the Remus she knew better.


	4. Quantum Leap

**November 1981**

Hermione did not see Remus again before her discharge the following morning. He had been gone in the evening, presumably for treatment purposes, as his bed had remained unchanged, a shabby messenger bag hung on one corner that she assumed was his.

Still, she would see him again, she thought, as she made her way to the Ministry. She would see him again––either here, or, hopefully, back in the future, where she belonged.

Once at the Ministry she sat through a two-hour-long interrogation, during which two Unspeakables and an Auror quizzed her thoroughly on her knowledge of Hogwarts and the Ministry and her Department. When finally they were––in the interim––satisfied, she was sent to introduce herself to the current Head of the Department of Mysteries, a wizard by the name of Paul Pyrmont.

After she had finished recapping her inadvertent time travel yet again, Pyrmont frowned and, after a pause, said, "Well, as you are and remain an Unspeakable, employed by this Department, we will naturally continue to remunerate you. You will––that is to say, you may come to work, depending upon your health situation, and I shall assign you to the Time Room. And, ah...let us know what resources you'll need. We'll do our best to help you return."

"Thank you so much." Hermione opened her mouth to continue, heart full, but Pyrmont went on, gruffly:

"But––it is very possible that to return will be exceedingly difficult."

She nodded slowly.

"And, indeed, should we find that it is not possible...we would need to consider the details of your remaining here in the past. We would need to consider...how least to disturb the events that are crucial to maintaining the integrity of the timeline. You must not interfere with things, as you well know...you must not be seen..."

Hermione thought of Remus, and his conversations with 'Jean'. She was considering whether to reveal her actions so far when Pyrmont pressed on, grimacing, "And I'm afraid that––we must also remember––the extreme pressure that significant lengths of time travel can exert upon a witch or wizard, especially if they remain in the past for too long a duration."

She nodded again, very slowly, trying to quell the nightmare-tinged sensation rising in her gut. "Yes, I...the Healer at St. Mungo's told me..."

"I would suggest," said Pyrmont, heavily, "that you research this health aspect first of all. It is the most pressing matter."

It was with these words weighing on her heart that Hermione left the Ministry that evening. She went straight to her room at the Leaky Cauldron. She had spent the day reading, searching, reading again, yet had found no morsel of good news.

Her sleeplessness and the headaches that had dogged her since finding herself here in the past––they were common symptoms, threaded through the summaries of cases of other wizards and witches who had once travelled too far, or stayed too long.

She, like them, was fading.

She did not know how long she had left; there was no clear pattern in the old cases, or at least not in the literature she had found thus far. But one fact was constant: if she remained here, she would not live for long.

Hermione felt a strange hollowness in herself, a hollowness in her despair, and also at the centre of the hope she tried her best to summon. She would spend every last effort to find a way back, she vowed. She would die trying––if she had to die anyway.

The next morning found her back at St. Mungo's, waiting to see a specialist in Dislocation, whom Pyrmont had recommended to her. She doubted the specialist would have anything drastically different to tell her, but she had never been one to leave any stone unturned. It hurt, however, to feel that ember of hope stirring inside her, hope that she quietly reminded herself could, and likely would, soon be crushed. Hope that somehow her situation was different, that _she_ would not fade, because, because...

"Miss Granger?"

She looked up to find the specialist, Amelia, a tall witch with her blonde hair in a bun, standing before her. With a slow nod, she followed Amelia into her office and sat, with a sense of trepidation, across the specialist's cluttered desk.

I've read about your circumstances," Amelia began, gently. Hermione steeled herself for the worst. And it came: "I think you may have come across this already in research of your own at the Ministry, but there is usually fading associated with long-term time travel. There are things we can do to alleviate pain and other symptoms whilst you are here, but ultimately...the only cure will be finding a way to transport you back into your time."

 _Or I'll die_ , Hermione thought, simply. "Yes," she said. "I understand. How long...How long do I...?"

The question, unfinished, was nevertheless understood. "I'm afraid it has always varied very much in previous cases...it could be a few months, or two or three years. I'll be sending enquiries for similar cases, and then we can make an estimate for you..."

She left Amelia's office feeling drained and small, a loose sheaf of parchment to be caught in a draft at any moment, and decided on a whim that she needed to see a friendly face again. Even if she ought not be seen...even if he did not know her yet...and if perhaps he too needed the distraction...she would sit by Remus' bed and talk about safe, boring subjects, just to hear a voice she knew.

But Remus was not in bed when she went to see him. He was on his feet, apparently gathering his belongings in preparation to leave. Standing up he looked even more appallingly youthful, all straight lines and lean muscles under his rumpled muggle clothes, and Hermione had to remind herself that here, in this time, he was the same age as she was. She felt an odd sense of loss in that moment, watching this tall, blond boy she did not know.

When he turned, however, his eyes were familiar, and she found the rest of him was familiar, too––she knew that face, its expressions, the unconscious modest grace of his gestures.

"Jean," Remus said, warmly, and she felt an almost physical wave of relief wash over her at the sight of a friendly face.

"Hi, Remus," she said, grateful as the relief continued to travel, anchoring her somewhat from her previous hollow daze. "Are you checking out?"

He nodded. "Oh yes, my holiday here is over, I'm afraid." Then he looked at her more closely. "Are you alright? I thought perhaps you'd left."

"Oh, yes. Yes, I was discharged, I just came back today for an appointment." She nodded towards his shabby, half-filled bag. "I won't keep you."

But Remus waved her off, another gesture that made her throat tighten just a little from its familiarity. "Don't worry, I'm not in a hurry to be anywhere."

"Oh, good. Good," she said, weakly, realising only now she was with him that she did not quite know what was safe to talk about, and what would be saying too much.

Remus, unbound by such troubles, propped himself on the edge of his bed, long legs extended, and said, quietly, "I wanted to tell you––thanks for coming by to talk to me, Jean. I needed it. I don't know what you were in here for, but if you need someone to lend an ear yourself, I'm more than willing to oblige."

Hermione smiled. How much Remus sounded like his older self, and how very like him to be so intuitive and show such kindness, even in such a time of despair as he himself faced. She could not, she thought, place the mess of her situation upon his shoulders.

"Oh, I'm alright, I...perhaps I'd better..."

"Would you like a cup of tea? I could use one," he interrupted, perhaps sensing her impending departure.

She admitted, after a beat, "I would," and found herself very glad he wanted her company. Remus nodded. He produced a teapot and two cups with his wand, and Hermione watched as he tapped the teapot, setting it to brew. When he had handed her one of the cups, they perched companionably on the edge of the hospital bed.

After a few fortifying sips, Hermione said, carefully, "I'm just a little...lost." She stared into the depths of the clear brown liquid, collecting her thoughts, and what she wanted to tell him, and what she could. "I've lost touch with my friends and family...I'm trying to find my way back, but it's difficult."

If he was bemused by her vagueness, he did not show it. He merely drank his tea and listened, his expression sombre.

"I'm sorry about your friends," she added, quietly.

He lowered his head. "And I yours." He continued, after a pause, seeing that she did not intend to speak, "James and Lily, they...they had a son. I just don't know who will, how he'll..."

"Harry," said Hermione, thinking of Harry as an infant, alone and parentless, no doubt even now at his aunt and uncle's, facing down years of cruelty and neglect.

"Harry?"

Wondering if somehow she had said more than she should have known, Hermione nodded. "Their son? People have been talking about...I mean, with Voldemort gone..."

"Harry," Remus repeated, as though testing the word; he was giving her an inscrutable look. "The name they gave him is Henry, but, yes, some call him Harry."

She looked back at him, smiling. "What?"

She watched him to see if he was joking, though if he was, it was an odd joke to make. Remus nodded, seemingly entirely serious. "His name is Henry?" she asked, nervous now. She hoped he would laugh, and say that he was joking, or mistaken, but he did not. It was on the tip of her tongue now to tell him, _listen, I've known Harry for more than a decade now, he's one of my best friends, and I've never heard him or any single person around us ever so much as utter the word 'Henry' in relation to him_. But she bit her tongue. She said, instead, "My mistake, I must have heard..."

Remus shrugged, though she felt his eyes linger on her face for another beat before he spoke again. "I just hope they've found somewhere he'll be safe and well-looked after."

"I'm sure they'll...try their best," Hermione said, thinking of the stories Harry had told of his life at Privet Drive, and the magic that had required his return all those years. "Perhaps family?"

"Yes. But after Lily's sister passed away, I'm not sure there's anyone left on either side." His tone was bitter again, dull with grief. "No grandparents, nobody...and his godfather gone, and me––." He broke off.

But Hermione did not have the capacity just now to think about the tail end of what he was saying. She was stuck on his first sentence, and felt as though there had been a delay in transmission in her hearing and her comprehension. She simply could not comprehend what Remus had just said; either he was playing a very cruel joke on her, or...or...what?

"No family...at all?" Hermione said, with difficulty. Now Remus was certainly looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and concern. But she had to clarify, needed to pin down the shifting earth beneath her feet. "No other siblings...sisters...on Lily's side?"

Remus shook his head. "Just her late sister."

She felt as though her mind was spinning, or the world around her. Remus put a steadying hand on her shoulder, but she barely felt it, and barely noticed too when he gently vanished her tea cup from her tenuous grasp.

"Jean," he said, softly, "are you alright? What's the matter?"

She pulled away from him, needing desperately to think, barely noticing how he flinched and quickly shifted to give her space.

"I just...I need to go," she said.

 

* * *

 

Surrounded on all sides by old copies of the Daily Prophet, each of which had only confirmed her fears and compounded her dread, Hermione lay curled in the middle of her cramped room at the Leaky Cauldron, staring up at the dusty ceiling. She had not felt like this for a long, long time––not since the thick of the War––this hollow acknowledgement that life was brutish and short, and she was doomed. This had not turned out to be true in the past, but this time, she knew, it was very, very different. She was doomed, and it was not morbid exaggeration, to which she was in any case not prone.

She was truly without hope, for her very life had depended upon her finding a way back to her time; and now it was not simply that, which itself had seemed an almost insurmountable task in the face of her steadily fading health. Now it seemed that she had to find a way, somehow, to transverse timelines altogether; to leave one reality and enter another. And this, she knew for a fact, had truly never before been done, except inadvertently.

In short, all things considered, and without melodrama, she was done for.

She lay there, unwilling or unable to move. There seemed no strength left in her bones. Her mind, confronted with a challenge she currently could not begin even to fathom, felt completely and utterly spent.

 

* * *

 

"You are sure of this? You haven't simply had your mind altered?"

Hermione lifted a shoulder, let it fall. "Every so often, the papers say something that to me should be entirely different. Things that simply did not happen, or did not happen that way, in my memories. And the Obliviators have checked my memory, for traces of dark magic or potions, but...no, my mind has not been altered." How she wished it had.

Pyrmont was gazing at her now with sympathy and something approaching awe. She understood why, but still she despised the look.

"I can't believe..." he muttered. "An entirely distinct timeline..."

She did not bother with a response. Pyrmont furrowed his brow, digging his clasped hands into his chin, ruminating.

"You said the _infinitum_ jar transported you."

"Yes," she said. "But how, I have no idea, we were fighting off Death Eaters at the time, as you know...I don't know...whose spell it was, whether it struck the jar or broke it, whether...without the jar here, I can't even use it to reverse..."

"Yes," Pyrmont said, wincing. "Yes...Grang––Hermione, I won't pretend that this is like any situation we have ever encountered." (She wished he would.) "However, I promise we'll help you to work on whatever, whatever it is you think gives you the greatest chance of return. Any at all...and I'm sure, I'm sure that the Department on the other end is doing the same."

Hermione looked at him dully. "The Department I came from?"

He nodded. "They have the original jar. And perhaps they witnessed whatever spell was cast, upon you or the jar. I'm sure they're working on retrieving you as we speak. It's policy..."

She nodded, suddenly feeling immensely tired once again. Pyrmont's words struck little hope inside her, a spark on damp tinder; it seemed too late, seemed it would simply take too long. As she'd learnt at St. Mungo's and through everything she'd read, she did not have the luxury of time. She could not wait, for the waiting was killing her.

"Perhaps you can go home and get some rest for now," Pyrmont suggested, seeing the lack of spirit in her face.

"I will," she said. Her voice seemed to issue from elsewhere; a stranger's mouth that was not her own, though it opened when she told it to, and closed upon her command. "Thank you."


	5. The Secrets

**November 1981**

It was grief, she knew that now. Still, how strange it felt to be grieving her own life, grieving herself, thinking and remembering these minute details of the past in whatever haphazard manner they arose from the depths of her mind.

Her parents, who she would never see again. The strange knowledge of there being _her parents_ here, too, in this reality, and also _herself_. _How different were they?_ she pondered, more than once. Would they recognise her, if she showed up on their doorstep? Would they see through the tricks of time and space and know, somehow, after all, that she was their daughter?

And her friends––Harry, Ron. Everything they'd been through, the best times and the most terrible. The sense of pure, undiluted relief that had gradually soaked into her soul and her very bones upon the realisation of Voldemort's final defeat. The rhythm of life that had slowly returned after that, a steadfast percussion beat, as everyone had begun to pick up after the War and come to terms with all that had passed.

That––all that loss––was all lost now, too, and it left her doubly bereft.

 

* * *

 

"So how long do I have?"

Amelia hesitated. Hermione knew that it caused the Healer pain as well to break the news, but for now she did not have the capacity to care, to bear another's burden.

"According to previous cases, my best estimation is...perhaps a year," Amelia said quietly. "In the Americas there was a similar case about a century back. A wizard who went back twenty-odd years. It was the same timeline, however, for him. For a different timeline, like in your case, it could be worse, or the same, or perhaps better...we truly have no way of knowing. I'm sorry, Hermione."

"The other wizard––he...faded...after a year?"

Amelia nodded. Hermione found herself doing so as well, because she did not know at that moment what was left to do.

"We'll keep working with you on the symptoms that arise." Amelia tried to meet her eyes, but Hermione kept them lowered, fighting the tears that threatened to fill them, finding herself losing the battle. "We'll do everything we can to ensure you are feeling as comfortable as possible, so that you can continue to work, if you choose to."

 _If she chose to._ As if it were a fruitless endeavour, good only for helping her maintain some desperate pretense of normalcy.

Slowly, however, as the seconds ticked by, Hermione felt something numb inside her stirring. _If she chose to_... What did she choose?

The question insinuated itself under her skin and suffused her, and she found she wore it like armour.

What did she choose to do with the time she had left, even it was to be spent here, far from everything and everyone she had ever known?

When the chances of her return looked slimmer with every day that went by at the Department of Mysteries without a discovery, what would she choose?

And when she felt the terrifying feeling of her fading and the deep despair of isolation––what would she choose?

She would choose to keep trying. She chose to try everything in her power. She chose, she thought to herself after another day of defeat at the Ministry, to live as best as she could, here, in whatever time she had left. And this timeline, being entirely distinct from her own, would not be so disturbed by her; her interactions, kept small, would not easily cause chaos, unbirth, destruction.

 

* * *

 

One cold weekend evening found her at Hogwarts, almost pleading with Albus Dumbledore in his office, where he sat facing her across his desk.

"Please, Professor," she tried again. "You must have come across...perhaps you might know someone who has..."

She had shared with him the story of how she had come to be here in this reality, and given him a succinct account of the role she, Harry and Ron had played in the War back in her own timeline.

But Dumbledore shook his head, sadness in his sharp, familiar blue eyes, and Hermione realised only then that she had been harbouring a last morsel of hope, hope that he would somehow save her; that he, omniscient as he had always seemed, might have simply held the answers she so urgently craved. As if he would say, _ah, this is a most interesting question, Miss Granger...here is a book on the matter, which I think you will find helps to clarify things_.

"I am very sorry, Miss Granger."

He was alive, and sitting mere feet from her, and he could not help her.

"But..."

"I have learned of such cases, but they have always been the results of misadventures, not purposeful travel. I am afraid...I have not studied Time and Dislocation in sufficient detail to begin to devise a mode of returning you to your home. This is an area where those at the Ministry, in your Department, will have far more knowledge and experience..."

Hermione nodded. She inspected her feet, the shoes she had worn here from another time, another world. (Had they known they would carry her this far?) The finality of Dumbledore's words cut her, but what was another death, another disappointment, when one had already died, had already depleted all hope?

_What did she choose?_

When at work the next week her colleagues invited her to their wedding in the weekend, she said yes.

 

* * *

 

Everyone was happy.

Everyone was happy, and she observed it as if back in her childhood, when her mother treated her to afternoon movies in the summer. There was laughter, clinking glasses, everyone dressed up, and everyone was cheerful and carefree. It looked spontaneous; it felt deliberate. How alone she felt; everyone was happy, and she was not.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of grasping life and choosing to make of it what she could, whilst she could, Hermione resolved to find something to enjoy. The food, perhaps; if only things would cease to taste like ink and parchment. The wine, which was generously served; she must be careful not to choose to drown. The music from the band, if it could tempt her feet into dancing; they played wizarding songs, and muggle songs for Richard, the happy groom, who was muggle-born. Or the conversations, maybe; but it felt enough to listen, not to be a part of them. Beside her, her colleague was demanding of a tall, copper-haired wizard, _Do you believe in love at first sight?_ To which he chortled, _See, not at first..._

And she tried to enjoy even the jubilation, the thrill in the air that came from liberation, for now, freedom from the looming shadows of the Dark Lord. Knowing what she knew, this last was much harder to enjoy, and instead she found herself endlessly grateful when she caught sight of a familiar golden head in the crowd, his sandy hair caught in the shine of the festive lamplight. Remus. She watched him, hoping he would see her, hoping he would come to her. But of course, _he_ knew these people, or some of them; he belonged here, to this time; she did not. She watched him saying hello to others and then congratulating the happy couple. He looked a little more recovered from his grief, but she could see that at times his smile still did not reach his eyes.

 _Come here_ , she found herself thinking. _Come here and we can be alone in our sadness together_. How she longed again for a familiar face, and if she admitted it, how especially she longed for Remus' calm and quiet understanding of her.

Finally, just as the band struck up another song, Remus looked across the room and saw her. She gave him a smile when their eyes met, and felt her stomach make a strange sort motion when he returned it. He was looking handsome in deep green robes; they brought out the green in his eyes, and the dark wheat-gold of his hair.

She began to reprimand herself for these thoughts, but stopped. Here Remus was not married; had not been her professor; was not nineteen years her senior. Here he was twenty; he was alone. And she––she was here, and here she would likely remain, until the day there was no more of her left to fade. She was permitted to think him handsome; it was harmless.

Hermione made her way to him as he moved toward her, and they met near the centre of the room, surrounded by the murmur and laughter of the couples dancing around them.

"It's good to see you here," she said. He was even more handsome up close, now that she was allowing herself to notice it; his brow, the line of his jaw, his tender eyes. He felt so familiar to her, despite the foreign youth of his looks.

"And you, Jean," he told her, and this time his smile did reach his eyes. Warmed by it, she made another choice:

"Will you dance with me?"

He looked surprised, as if he felt he did not deserve the attention she was giving him. It tugged at her heart, that look. "Come on," she urged. "Please?"

Remus, it seemed, could not refuse such a request, though she could not tell if it was out of courtesy or any interest in her. He took her hand and placed his other on her waist, as they slipped in amongst the couples that surrounded them. She had heard the song before.

_When I was just a little girl_

_I asked my mother..._

She turned her head to one side and rested it gently against his shoulder. His scent comforted her, clean and warm, forest green hinting at an inviting darkness. This, and the wine, they were making her reckless, or perhaps simply strengthening her resolve not to waste whatever time she had left.

_Here's what she said to me._

"Can I tell you something, Remus?"

She looked up. He was looking down at her, a hesitant affection in his blue eyes.

"What is it?"

_The future's not ours to see_

"It's a secret," she said, softly.

He was quiet. "Then perhaps..."

Softer still: "You're the only one I can tell."

He looked torn at this intimacy, at the mystery she was offering him. He looked as if he did not wish her to share her secrets with him, yet not as if he did not wish to know.

"What is it?" he whispered. Up close she could see the threads of alice blue in his light gaze, and the way his eyes sometimes looked green, dappled as they were now by warm lamplight.

"I'm all alone here," she whispered. It seemed to take ages for her lips and tongue to form the next words: "I'm not from here, this time. That was...it was why I was at the hospital."

She found it was a relief to have confessed, a relief simply to have spoken such words out loud. She did not know if they made sense. Still, he looked stricken.

"Not from here?"

She nodded, watching the struggle for comprehension playing out across his face. She knew he would understand, and quickly. She knew him, after all.

"Not from––now?"

Again she nodded.

He was silent for a moment. They still moved to the music, slowly, taking temporary shelter in the ordinariness of dancing at a wedding.

_I asked my sweetheart_

_what lies ahead?_

She didn't think she could bear it if he didn't understand, or if he refused to. Her isolation felt physical, a hard, tangible kernel tucked into her ribs, hurting her when she breathed.

"Remus..." she began, but he shook his head, almost imperceptibly, and she stopped. She could feel something like despair building in her stomach. He spoke, now.

"Perhaps you ought not to confide in me."

He still held her, despite his denying her. She looked down at their feet, at the wooden floor.

"Oh," she said.

"There––there are things I have not told you. That I cannot tell you." His voice was low and pained, his soft expression now twisting with a familiar self-loathing. "Secrets of my own."

The music had faded and she was vaguely aware of the band easing into a new piece, a lively wizarding song, yet the two of them stayed the way they were, almost still amidst the dancers. Hermione lifted her head, swallowed and felt the lump in her throat, the knot of isolation in her chest.

"I know," she whispered.

He stared at her, ceasing now to move at all, so that they stood quite still in the carefree crowd.

She said, very quietly, "I know what you are."

But to apologise, whether for her knowledge or for the ineffaceable tone of accusation bound up in such a sentence, Hermione reached for Remus as she spoke, bringing him by degrees into an embrace that he returned at first guardedly, then with feeling, loose arms tightening around her.

When she pulled back to meet his eyes, he was gazing at her with wonder and disbelief.

"You know me," he said, simply, and she nodded.

"You know me and what I am and you––you don't––mind it?"

Again, that cold, bitter shadow of self-hatred that coloured his features, something she had always wished she could spell or smooth away. She said, with all her heart, "Remus, _not at all_."

She took his hand and led them out from the crowd, away from the dancers, to find a quieter corner of the festivities.

"Why are you here?"

She swallowed. "An accident."

"How...will you go?"

"I––I don't know."

"How––far back? Or––"

"Twenty years."

If this shocked him, he did not show it, and she was grateful to him for that, and for his next question, asked quietly.

"Are you alright?"

It made her want to cry, somehow. She'd thought she wouldn't let herself, not anymore, or she'd never be able to stop.

"It's killing me," she said, plainly. "I'm fading, so they tell me."

Remus reached out as if to grasp her hand, but he restrained himself; so she took his hand instead, seeking his comfort which she so dearly wanted. He squeezed her hand, taking it in both of his. She almost forgot his youth, almost forgot that this was not the same Remus who had heartened her and Harry and Ron during the War. There was solace and strength in his presence, and now she found it again.

"Can I help?"

She gave him a somewhat tremulous smile. "I'm very glad you're here, Remus."

He nodded, looking as if he did not quite know what to say, but she could sense from him that silent, strong support she had once come to rely on. That was enough––more than enough. She felt something almost like contentment slip into her blood again, felt a little more alive again, for the first time in days.

She said, "Would you...could we keep in touch?" Having this feeling in her veins again, she fervently wished to preserve it and its source. How fortunate it was to have a friend here!

Remus had released her hand. "Certainly––if you're sure you...if you truly don't––" he began, haltingly, and understanding at once, Hermione shook her head, kept shaking it.

"We were friends, Remus. Or we will be, I suppose. Really, truly, I don't care at all––it isn't even something that you should have to...I don't _care_ , Remus, at all."

He still could not quite meet her eyes, but he nodded.

"Then I––then please, write to me, Jean."


	6. Teacups

**November 1981**

_Dear Remus,_

_Thank you for_

_I was glad to_

_How are you? This is Herm_

Impatiently, Hermione crumpled up the ruined parchment and pulled a fresh roll across the cramped wooden desk in her room at the Leaky Cauldron. She squinted at the blank page, quill hovering.

_Dear Remus,_

_How are you? I'm very glad you were at the wedding last week. Thank you for listening to me – and for believing me when I told you the strange story of how I got here._

_I would love to meet again, if you would like to. Perhaps I could explain a little more. Or perhaps you might want to talk, and I could listen. I know you're going through something I can't imagine right now, and I'm here to support you if you would like it._

She paused, sighed, looked up at the ceiling.

_If not, it might be nice even just to sit together over some tea._

_Jean_

 

* * *

 

_Dear Jean,_

_Thank you for your letter. I am glad I could do anything to help you during what you are going through right now. And thank you for listening to me, too. I think I will take you up on that offer of tea. Where would you like to meet? As for when, well – pick a date that suits you. I'm at something of a loose end these days._

_Yours,_

_Remus_

 

* * *

 

_Dear Remus,_

_I'm looking forward to it!_

_If you don't mind, perhaps we could meet at the Leaky. It's where I'm staying for now, and these days I haven't felt like venturing far._

_As for when, well, I'm rather at a loose end as well, as you would know. During the day I'm searching for a way back that seems more and more impossible; and nights are worse because I'm thinking about the searching. So, your company even tonight would be very welcome._

_Whenever you decide to come, just send me an owl._

_Yours,_

_Jean._

 

* * *

 

_Dear Jean,_

_Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but I'll see you tonight at the Leaky._

_Yours,_

_Remus._

 

* * *

 

"Remus, hi."

She called out as she descended the last few steps of the narrow staircase that led up to the rooms over the pub. Remus looked up and saw her beckoning, and approached her, wearing that familiar smile on his youthful face. A strand of dark blond hair had fallen into one eye. Hermione had to remind herself that it was fine to look and to think him handsome. Still, she felt a twinge of guilt and sadness whenever she did so, reminded of the world she had left behind––where Remus was just as handsome, but older, and _married_ , to her friend, to Tonks.

_He is not him_ , she thought.

As always, her mind rejoined: _Isn't he, though?_

"Are we going to your room?" he asked, when she began to lead him upstairs.

She returned, playfully, before she could stop herself, "What are you insinuating, Remus?" Again, the twinge of guilt. Yet it was worth it, she thought, even if she should not have spoken like that to Remus. For he had gone slightly pink, but there was also a roguish twinkle in his eyes that she had previously only seen directed at Tonks.

"My apologies," Remus said, but in a tone that she felt was almost undeniably flirtatious, and which certainly made her question the direction their relationship might be taking in this new reality. She liked him, she could feel it in her ribs, and if he might like her too––how strange it was, and yet...

Once in her room, they squeezed into the chairs at the tiny tea table by her bed, and Hermione found her wand and made them a pot of Darjeeling. It was one of his favourites, she knew, and judging by the quick assessing look he gave her, he was wondering just how much she might know about him.

"You know, I––I'm very glad you've believed everything I've said so far, about, well, everything," Hermione said, summoning a packet of biscuits to join them. "I'm not sure I'd believe myself."

Remus nodded slowly, watching her hands move as she arranged the biscuits on a plate.

"I suppose I...suspected, a little."

She looked up at him, curious. "Why?"

He was quiet for a moment, surveying her with those familiar eyes, except that here, now, she found her reaction to them somewhat troubling. He was looking at her penetratingly, and it left her feeling vulnerable, yet pleasantly so. Remus had never looked at her like that before.

He murmured, "You looked at me as if you knew me."

Hermione held his gaze for some time, unknowingly transfixed by the look in his eyes. After a moment Remus looked abruptly down at his cup, as if embarrassed by how forward he was being. She took the opportunity to clear her throat, finding that she had somehow become a little out of breath.

"Yes, well...you were right."

Remus smiled at his tea. "How have you been?"

She drank some tea, letting the delicate taste fill her mouth as she considered. "Alright." It was her turn to direct a smile at her cup rather than her companion. "The Healers have given me potions for the headaches and the insomnia. Nothing for the existential dread, however."

Now Remus shared a crooked, rueful smile with her.

"I can't imagine," he said. Unspoken, she knew he was inviting her to say whatever felt comfortable for her, if anything. He ventured, "Are you still researching how to travel back? Can I help?"

Hermione nodded, then shook her head. "I'm working with the Ministry, my Department...but thank you for being so kind, Remus. You always are."

He was watching her again, looking away when she noticed. Taking a drink of tea, he said, "Did you...will you...know me well?"

She smiled, and though she did not quite understand why, something inside her felt very warm because of the way he had asked the question. "Quite well," she told him. "We were good friends. Which is why I felt I could come to you here, I suppose."

"If this is twenty years ago for you, then––should we be speaking? I mean to say––I'm very glad that we are, but––will it affect things?"

Hermione nodded slowly. "I know, I––yes, usually, but I've since learned that I've not only travelled back in time, I...I'm not even in the same timeline."

Remus' mouth had fallen open slightly. She made herself look away from the temptation of his parted lips.

She continued, "Everything is mostly the same...just slightly different in the details. Of course, still, what I do here will affect _this_ timeline..." She trailed off, guiltily. "I haven't spoken to anyone else so far, though––just my Department, and Dumbledore, and you."

"Are you going to have to wipe my memory?" Remus joked. But it made Hermione think of wiping her parents' memories, the new identities she had given them, and her stomach turned over, at the memory of what she'd had to do as well as the thought of her parents.

"I'm sorry," Remus said, quickly, reaching out to touch a hand to her arm. His touch was warm but light, and she laid her own hand upon his, needing the comfort.

"It's not your fault." She attempted a smile, but felt tears rising instead. "God, I'm sorry. Inviting you round and then doing this to you."

Remus smiled for her, gently squeezing her arm. "That's what friends are for."

Friends. How truly, truly glad she was to have one here.

She stood to refill the pot of tea manually, wanting to take the opportunity to stem the tears. "How have you been, Remus?" She turned away from him, busying herself in the ritual.

"Oh." He paused. "You know. Aimless, now there's no War to fight in. Trying to get by without being a massive burden on my parents."

_Trying to get by without any of his closest friends_ , she thought.

She brought the teapot back and refilled their cups, then sat down on her bed, opposite Remus' chair.

"I'm sorry, Remus."

"S'not your fault."

A moment passed as they sipped their tea.

"I have to be honest with you," she said.

"What is it?"

"My name is Hermione," she admitted. "I've been using my middle name, just at first...in case I shouldn't've been seen or heard here..."

She chanced a look at him, dreading that at any moment he would announce that he had had enough, that he could not tolerate her lies any longer.

"Hermione," Remus repeated; and surely, surely his mere saying of her name should not hold such power over her. She swallowed, not quite able to meet his eyes in that moment. _Not obvious at all_ , she chided herself. Honestly, she'd never been like this with a man before, or a boy; had never thought of herself as shy and blushing like this, with the exception of her schoolgirl crush on Lockhart. And this comfort, this warm weight of comfort she had instantly and then constantly felt in Remus' presence––had she felt it before, with the older Remus she had known? How much of this was new, and how much something she had buried before?

When she met his gaze, she felt as if a current passed between them. He wanted her too, she knew that now.

And why couldn't she have him? What reason was there, now, at this juncture, to say no?

_Because he's married_ , her mind supplied. _He's married, and Tonks is his wife_.

"Hermione?"

Her name again, repeated in that soft voice of his, tenderness overlying that faint hoarseness of something hidden, something darker. It was just one word, yet it was doing something to her.

"Yes," she said; it came out in a whisper, as though she could conceal her emotions this way. It had, of course, the opposite effect. The hushed tone cast an undeniable intimacy onto the scene, made her very aware of the smallness of the room and the insignificance of the distance between them.

Hermione did not believe in true love, or love at first sight. Love, for her, was something that grew, that was nurtured and blossomed over time. Whatever it was she was feeling now, she thought, it surely could not be love. Perhaps desire; a need for comfort and a companion in the midst of her strange new world; it could not be _love_.

Yet it felt like love, if love felt like this––if love felt like this deep comfort, this warmth in his eyes, the way she wanted simply to be with him, near him.

She willed herself to speak, to divert them from this dangerous juncture. So she said, though it was out of nowhere, "Yes, I think I'll keep trying with the jar."

Remus nodded, and she wondered whether he truly looked disappointed, or if it was merely wishful thinking on her part.

"Yes, you must." His tone was light, friendly. She didn't want that right now, she thought, then caught herself again, before she could set herself imagining just what tones she did want Remus to be taking.

They passed the better part of the next hour in similar conversation, Hermione resolutely putting her newfound or newly acknowledged feelings for Remus Lupin out of her already troubled mind. She was pleased to have mostly returned to normality by the time Remus had risen to bid her goodnight and goodbye for the evening. But he said, hopefully, before he went,

"I'll see you again?"

It utterly unwound any progress she might have made. For he wanted to see her again––he liked her...

"Yes," she smiled, not restraining her expressions any longer. "Thank you for such a lovely evening. I'd like to do this again, too." _While I'm able to_ , she thought, more darkly, and with a by now familiar lick of a bone-deep sadness.

She stepped in to give him a hug goodbye, and felt his arms go about her waist, felt one warm hand come to rest in the small of her back. Instinctively she tightened the embrace, her eyes falling shut for a moment, breathing in his scent of soap and something warmer and tempting underneath. He held her close, their embrace becoming almost fierce. Beneath her hands he was leanly muscled, hard curves and straight lines...

His hand slid up her back slowly, and he drew back to gaze into her eyes. His own, in the dim light of her room, were a soft shade of green that seemed to hold countless unspoken promises in their depths.

_This is Remus_ , she thought again. Her friend, her former professor, husband of Tonks.

And yet this was _Remus_ ; twenty-one, unattached, and he wanted her, and she...she wanted him, very much so. The tension that existed between them now was palpable.

This Remus seemed more than willing to breach the boundaries of their platonic relationship. He leaned in and, after searching her eyes, kissed her. She gripped on to his shoulders then, trembling beneath his lips, overwhelmed by the volume of what she felt for him in that moment, and by the seeming inevitability of their coming together.

She broke the kiss after much too long, touching her forehead to his, whispered, "Remus, we can't..."

Disappointment and resignation, and something like shame, chased each other across his face, even as he nodded and straightened. She immediately missed his nearness.

"Right," he managed, not meeting her eye. He seemed to be struggling with some painful emotion, one hand jumping up to trace the scar on the skin of his throat. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have..."

"I'm sorry," she whispered back. "It's just that you're..." _Older, married, not mine to have?_

Remus flinched and quickly released her, backed away as though to touch her at all burned him. "I understand," he said quickly, his voice quiet and his head low. "I know. I shouldn't have...stupid of me." His hands were loosely curled by his sides and he could not meet her eyes.

"No," she said, searching for the words. _No, I feel it too. I did––I do want you._ And his reaction, she was realising, was to something else, to an imagined objection, one which she would never pose, but which was perhaps his greatest fear. She put her hands on his arms, searched for his eyes. "No, Remus, I didn't mean..."

"It's okay," he said. He had gathered himself and it hurt her to see the door that had closed in his eyes. "I understand. I should never have put you in that position––I would never want to burden you with––"

She kissed him, kissed him to staunch the wound of words that bled from his lips, kissed him to communicate all that she could not quite seem to put into words herself. He resisted at first, tense beneath her hands, but sank slowly toward her, his mouth warm and urgent, his touch restrained but tender.

"It's not that," she murmured, "not that, never that––I don't care about your being a werewolf, I never have––"

The third meeting of their lips left her dizzy and breathless, drunk on an intoxicating warmth she hadn't felt since the early days with Ron. How she wished she could forget everything, everyone, and give in to this. It took her many moments to recall her objections to this, and many more to formulate them. "We shouldn't because––because you're married," she tried, and watched him reluctantly draw back to gaze at her through hazy eyes.

"I am?"

"Yes––well––you will be."

"I will?" His voice was tempting her close again, low and warm and husky, tenderness smoothed over honey and gravel. "And not to you?"

The simple sincerity in his unconsidered words drew her breath away, and made her heart constrict painfully. "No," she said, trying a laugh. "Not to me."

He hesitated for a moment. "So in another reality I'm married," he murmured, finally, "and that means I can't kiss you right now?"

She felt herself begin to smile, and saw it reflected on his lips.

"When you say it like that..."

The complications were falling away. Here he was not _him_ ; he was not older, not married, did not belong to another. Here, for however long she was granted survival here, he could be hers. It would surely be foolish to give up the possibility of such happiness for however long the rest of her life might turn out to be.

But it would not be fair to him...

"I'm fading," she reminded him, as the truth of it began to sink in again through the faultlines of her fracturing denial. "I'm dying, Remus." It was not a burden she wanted him to bear.

The look in his eyes would break her heart if she let it. But he kissed her, and she kissed him back; closed her eyes to his sorrow and her own, and willed their hunger to drown out everything else, so that even for merely a few blissful hours, she would not have to feel or think of anything else.


	7. Weaving

 

**November 1981**

Hermione awoke in the dark, briefly disoriented, to find herself laying atop the covers of her bed, Remus asleep beside her, one arm curled loosely over her waist. His body radiated warmth; she wished she could strip off the jeans and jumper she'd fallen asleep in.

She gazed up at the ceiling, fuzzy blue-black in the darkness, and tried to resist the impending wave of sadness that threatened to wash over her whenever she awoke, and remembered. Instead, she thought about how Remus had held her earlier in the evening, touched her skin with light fingers, peppered her face and throat with kisses. She felt a small yet fierce wave of gratitude that he was there beside her, was grateful now for his heat and his simple presence.

Trying not to make too much noise on the old mattress, she shifted to face Remus, and smiled at the look of his sleeping face in the dim light. She watched him breathing slowly, in and out, and wondered how it was that she could feel so close to him, so quickly. Wondered, then, just how well she did know him; how different he might be from the Remus she'd known; and what it meant if they were the same and she loved him here. But, she thought, it was not something she needed to worry about.

Hermione stroked his arm, feeling the wrinkles in the fabric of his shirtsleeve, and then could not resist tracing a fingertip down the bridge of his nose. She could feel the slight raise of the familiar scar there, though she could not quite see it in the dimness. Remus seemed to feel it too, for his eyelids flickered, and then he was watching her, sleepy-eyed and relaxed, and the simple connection of their eyes warmed her right through to her heart.

"Hermione," he murmured. There was something about the way he said her name, a combination of the fact that she had never heard the older Remus say her name like _this_ ––had indeed never even imagined it––and the sincerity of the affection that shone through, as if he had never uttered any other name as he did hers.

She did not respond, but she continued to trace his features, watching how his eyelids fluttered shut again, feeling the tender movement of his eyes, loving, loving how vulnerable he had allowed himself to be with her. Her fingertips found their way to his lips, tracing the seam gently until he parted them for her, and a liquid pleasure stirred within her at the touch of his tongue on her skin. He wet her fingertips with a slow, suggestive movement of his lips, and she drew her hand back, but only to grip his jaw and pull him close for a deep kiss. The quiet of the night was broken now by the sounds of their intermingled breaths, the shift and slide of the covers as he drew her closer, until her hands found the firm muscle of his chest and his hands roamed up her back, sliding slowly up under her jumper and shirt and against her bare skin.

She wanted him. He sensed her need and took her mouth hungrily, his touch growing bolder, both hands slipping beneath her shirt, hiking her jumper up until she reluctantly parted from him to strip it off, tossing it aside and brushing her hair back as she recentred herself on top of Remus, straddling the growing hardness between his thighs. His heated hands found her stomach, her sides, cupped her through her bra, as she leaned down to sink back into the kiss. With her eyes shut she felt adrift again in the sea into which she had been cast, but with him the water was warm and the chill was gone.

Gazing into his eyes, her forehead resting on his as they caught their breath, she wondered what he was thinking, what he thought of her. She had simply appeared in his life, knowing things she ought not to know, knowing, too, things that were no longer true, and he had accepted it. Accepted her.

"Want you," she whispered, moving against him, watching as his eyes closed and his lips parted, throat exposed and vulnerable as he tipped his head back, feeling her. She kissed the scars that marred his pale skin, her own breathing growing shallower when his hands found her hips, large and strong as he caressed her and pressed her warmth more firmly down against him. She shut her eyes and buried her face in his neck, gasping, as the pleasure began to mount. Remus rolled them over, bracing himself above her; his hips moved against her, the rhythm he searched out an intoxicating string of promises.

But she let out a soft gasp at a blunt throb of pain in her temples. He stilled at once, bringing one hand to cover her own where it was pressed to his chest. "Hermione?" His voice was hoarse. "What is it?"

She managed, reluctantly, "My head," resentful of the timing, resenting it all the more when Remus moved off her, sitting beside her instead to take her into his arms.

"Where are your potions?" he murmured. He brushed her hair from her face, his fingers tender on her forehead, smoothing over another throb in her temples. Grateful for his gentle touch, she summoned her vials in the darkness. He helped her uncap one and held it to her lips. Though she could not see the expression on his face, she could feel the tenderness in him, a calmness that surrounded her and helped to soothe the fear that grew with each grim reminder of her numbered days.

She turned into him, to press her cheek to his chest, listened to the steady beat of his heart. His fingers ran lightly through her hair, skimming and then gently massaging her scalp. She pondered that if she did not love him yet, she was certainly in great danger of it.

"Thank you."

She felt rather than heard his quiet acknowledgment, a low, comforting movement against her cheek.

She awoke in his arms in the morning to find the room bathed in the pale first light. Remus stirred; she nestled closer to him, seeking his warmth, suddenly aware she wore only her bra above her jeans. His warm hand found her back, fingers opening across her skin, raising goosebumps across her neck and shoulders. Looking up, she found him blinking open drowsy blue eyes.

"Hey," she smiled, easing up to bring their faces level.

"Morning," he mumbled. "Cold? Sh'I get your jumper?"

"Unless you're...up to finish what we started?"

Remus' grin, somehow both boyish and wolfish at once, relieved her. "Oh. D'you want to?"

"Mm." Hermione leaned in for a slow kiss, relishing the gentle parting of his lips and the rasp of the shadow on his jaw. She slipped a hand onto his stomach, moving slowly southward, sensing the growing anticipation that inveiled them both. She found him already stiffening, his cock thick and hot to her touch; when she pressed down against him he let out an unsteady breath, lust darkening his eyes. She wanted him inside her, wanted to know what he felt like, wanted to watch the expressions play across his face as he took her and she made him lose control.

They came together slowly, her hand on the nape of his neck, bringing him down for a kiss as he entered her. Remus sank deep, touching depths of her that had gone untouched for a long while. He pulled back to gaze at her and broke into a brilliant grin when she smiled up at him. It felt good; it felt right.

"That okay?"

His voice was slightly hoarse again and sounded so familiar that it hurt her heart, but gazing into his eyes she reminded herself that, however strange it remained, he was both Remus and not Remus, and despite or because of this, she wanted him intensely. She said nothing, only nodded, ran her hands down his back, feeling the play and shift of lean muscle and the scars that crossed his skin. He began to move, then, slowly, drawing an intense pleasure from her at the feeling of it, his hard shaft sheathed within her warmth. Lost in the blue depths of his irises, she moved blindly with him, finding a rhythm that built and built, and––

He stilled inside her, leaving wet open-mouthed kisses across her jaw and neck as she cried out, the deep crests of sensation overwhelming her as Remus held her close. The emotion followed the physical, and the sea she had been adrift in since learning the truth of her fate suddenly felt knowable, as if he had given to her some much-needed strength. She felt buoyed, not drowned, and the difference was almost frightening. If he saw the wet shine of her eyes when she opened them, he did not question it. Instead he moved again in her, reading her need, starting to sate his own, sliding out and sinking deep, over and over again.

She urged him on, wanting more of what he had given her, wanting to give him the same, _wanting_ , until they came together, pulsing muscle and soul and sweat. She held him to her and tangled a hand in his hair, the sandy locks soft between her fingers. Together they lay there, limbs entwined, unwilling to separate for the moment. Hermione wondered for a moment at the cruelty of fate. To have given her this––something she had never felt before––with him, here, at this time...

Finally Remus moved, murmuring charms, before stretching out beside her, languid, naked as she was, his eyes soft with something like love. She felt it, too; something like love.

"Have we done this before?" he enquired, softly, and she laughed; they most certainly hadn't, but she knew what he meant. He kissed her neck, drawing a luxurious shiver from her. She looked then at the sleepy half-smile on his face, and admitted to herself that somehow, somewhere, at some point in time, she had begun to fall in love with him.

 

* * *

 

**December 1981**

"How are you holding up, Hermione?"

Pyrmont looked sympathetic, tentative, as he entered the small office where Hermione had set herself up. The _infinitum_ jar occupied one side of her desk; on the rest were stacks of parchment, her attempts to recall and note down any of the research she'd done back in her timeline. There was so much that could be done, so many avenues and theories, and that was the problem. She did not have the time, and so time would kill her. Without the original jar that had sent her here, there was little she could do to narrow down the possibilities.

She still had not fully admitted defeat, but she knew she grew closer to it every day.

"Getting by," she answered, her voice emerging more weakly than she would have liked. Pyrmont nodded, apparently at a loss for words, as had been all of the handful of her colleagues to whom she had disclosed her predicament. She was tired of it; she did not want their pity. It was of no use to her.

"Are you keeping up with Healer visits?" Pyrmont asked, gruffly.

"Yes."

They could do nothing for her but ameliorate the pain of the headaches that came and went, the spells of vertigo. It was palliative, not curative. Hers was a terminal diagnosis.

Her time with Remus was her only solace these days. She often stayed at the shabby cottage where he lived; it seemed to make more sense than the two of them cramped in together at the Leaky. It had only been a week, but she no longer questioned the pace at which they had moved, from strangers––on his side more than hers, admittedly––to lovers. After all, she could hardly take time very seriously these days. Order, convention, all that she had previously held dear––it was foolishness now.

Remus had become more to her in the space of a fortnight than any of the men and boys she had been with before.

Tonight, however, he would banish her from the cottage, and she had agreed to go. It was the full moon and he did not have Wolfsbane.

When she arrived from the Ministry she found him pacing the yard, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, a feverish look in his blue eyes.

"It's late," he growled as soon as he saw her. "You shouldn't have come."

She scowled, knowing the cause of his uncharacteristic aggression but still not liking it. "Moonrise isn't for hours, Remus. I'll leave by then, as I promised."

He bristled, came closer, eyes burning with a revulsion turned inward. "I'm a _werewolf_ ––don't you understand? It's not a joke––I could _kill_ you, or worse––"

"Remus...I'll leave plenty of time."

She could see him struggling with the wolf's instincts, so near the surface at the moment. He won, though with difficulty.

"Alright."

With a last look at him, she turned to enter the cottage and set down her bag, then went back to him, pulling him into an embrace that she could tell still surprised him. He was still surprised that she did not mind it, his condition. And this surprise still saddened her each time.

She kissed him, and when she drew back, she saw the shadow of the wolf in his eyes again.

"How many hours?" Remus' voice was a low rumble in his chest. She shook her head, momentarily hypnotised by what she read in his face.

"What?"

"How many hours to the moon now?"

Hermione knew he knew the answer to that question, and she knew what he was truly asking. She smiled into the next kiss he gave her, a hungry, slow demanding of her.

"Enough," she murmured.

Their coupling now was rough, feverish, his hips moving quickly between her thighs, their bodies covered in a sheen of sweat. He came with her, in her, with a grunt; she could feel that he stayed hard inside her, and moaned when he began to move again, the rarity of this selfish lovemaking heightening her arousal. It was the full moon, and he was not only a young man but also a werewolf, and this was too much for even him to repress. She sought it, encouraged him as he pinned her to the mattress and fucked her, grip tight on her hips, took her urgently until he came again, spilling into her tight warmth.

He began to draw out of her, still stiff, and she knew how difficult it must be for him to do. It was her turn to pin him down, on his back, moving down his taut body to touch and taste his stiff cock, coaxing out of him his third climax until he lay panting and watching her with hazy eyes.

"You...you need to go," he rasped, eventually.

Hermione nodded, rose and started to dress. He would not bother to do the same, she thought, not when his body was soon to transform––so painfully, so immensely. He had laid an arm across his eyes and her heart ached as she took in the map of pale scars across his body. Years of uncontrolled and uncontrollable transformations had left their mark. She had never truly considered what it had been, what it had taken, for him to endure this month after month without the potion. To be so wholly consumed by the moonlight each time––to lose yourself completely, forced to dwell without voice or reason in the body of a savage beast––and to always know, even when it was over, that it did not happen only once, but again, again, _again_ , and to hold yourself together until then, until the next time––

She knelt by the bed and kissed him, trying to convey strength and solidarity without words. She felt helpless; she had the knowledge of Wolfsbane, that it existed, yet no way to grant it to him. She...

"You should go," he repeated, his voice low. He touched her sleeve. "You'll check my wards?"

She swallowed, nodded before she drew away.

The wards Remus had drawn up around the cottage and the surrounding woods were faultless. They were concealment charms, muggle-repelling spells, specialised underage-repelling charms, silencing spells...he had no Wolfsbane, and he was clearly taking no risks. Hermione stood and watched the silent cottage in the distance for a long moment before Disapparating to the Leaky.

She spent the night at the Leaky and returned soon after sunrise. Taking down the wards one by one as she approached the cottage, she finally reached the door, unlocked it, and entered with some trepidation, wondering what state she would find him in.

Prepared as she'd thought she had been, the sight of him still took her breath away, as completely as if there had been a physical blow. He had made it to the bathtub; she found him by following the copper smears on the floorboards and across the threshold, over the white tiles of the bathroom. The white ceramic of the tub was scarlet with blood, and there was so much of it that for a heartrending moment before she saw the crimson wounds on his pale skin she wondered if he might have killed something in the night.

But it was his blood. He was covered in it. His wounds were deep, deeper than she had known from simply seeing old scars healed over. Remus seemed exhausted, unmoving, so she tried to cleanse the wounds, tried to do it gently, but the spells and the dittany stung his naked flesh, and she could only clench her teeth and try to soothe him when he moaned from the fresh pain she inflicted upon him. More scars; what were a few more scars to join the rest?

She pressed wistful lips to his wrist in silent apology, then to his temple. His eyes, when finally he opened them, were the colour of the forest. Some of the wildness of the wolf lingered in their depths, waning as the sun slowly rose.

When she had mended him as best as she knew how, she turned on the water, watching it wash away the coppery rosettes on his skin, cleansing the room of its iron tang. His mind was slowly finding its way back, and a little of his strength, for he took over and washed himself, though not without difficulty. Afterward she kissed his wet lips, smoothing back the wet and darkened locks of his hair. He looked tired and wan in the sunlight filtering through the bathroom window.

"Thank you..." he tried. "You don't need to..."

"Let me," she replied, simply, watching the sweep of his eyelashes, the colour of ripe wheat and beaded with water. He closed his eyes and nodded, lifting a wet hand dripping from the water to grasp hers. He did not need to say it: _I trust you_.

This intimacy––born though it was of her unhappy circumstance, and of his––she wanted it, wanted him. For this intimacy with him, some day before the end came she might almost be willing to forgive how they had met and how she would have to leave him. This intimacy which made her forget, as she had read before in books but never truly understood, where she stopped and he began. This intimacy which had no right to have grown so much and burrowed so deep in the space of mere weeks, but which somehow never could have done otherwise. From the moment she had found him at the hospital, nothing else could have happened; she would always have sought him out, ineluctably drawn to him, perhaps inexplicably or perhaps not.


	8. Entangled

**December 1981**

They were in bed, reading, her head rested on Remus' stomach, when he broached the first question.

"If you're from the future... _a_ future...then you know..."

Hermione lowered her book, though she felt a reluctance tugging inside her. It was time, it seemed, to talk about all the things they had thus far blissfully avoided.

Remus' fingers continued threading through her hair for now, and she wondered if he would stop––when he would stop––once he had heard the answers to his questions. Turning her head to the side, she met his eyes, and finished for him, quietly:

"Then I know what happened?"

He didn't answer her, but she watched him swallow, watched his eyes flicker away from hers for a moment, up, as he collected himself.

"Yes."

The sadness was there again, shadowing his gaze. She could read it on his face, the fallen friends, the betrayal, the solitude.

"I do," she said, carefully, unwillingly. "Or––I know a version of it."

He nodded, blinking once, twice, at the ceiling. "Right."

When he didn't speak again for a long moment, she asked him, softly, "What do you want to know?"

"You can't...that is, _can_ you...? Can you tell me?"

"I can." Hermione faltered. "If I _should,_ I'm not sure. I think..."

"No," Remus finished for her. "Because it would change things."

"But we've already changed things," she whispered.

Remus' hand had stilled in her hair. She sat up and moved up the bed to sit by his side, leaning against the headboard, hugging her knees to her chest. Remus shifted, too, sitting up and angling himself toward her, though he looked down at the covers. She looked at him for a while, at the hair that fell forward over his eyes, at the turn of his lips.

"I don't want to know everything." His voice was low, hesitant. "But I––do want to know, a little. I don't want to know if I––when I die, or when my parents will, things like that, things I'll dread. But if there's anything I could do––for the Order, perhaps––if you think it makes sense..."

"I don't know." She bit her lip, meeting his steady gaze when he looked up. "I don't know what I should do...I thought perhaps I'd tell Dumbledore, because he's the one who..."

"Right," he said, quickly. "That makes sense."

He deserved to know, Remus. And yet if she told him, what would happen? Everything would change. If Remus knew the truth about Sirius, if she told him, the confrontation with Peter in the Shrieking Shack might turn out differently...and if that happened, if Harry did not save Peter's life, Wormtail would not owe Harry a debt if or when he rejoined Voldemort... If Remus changed what he did, everything could change.

It was true that her coming here had already changed things, but she knew that to tell Remus everything, or even one thing that mattered to how the War had unfolded, would be to set in motion change of a completely different scale.

If things changed, it was possible the War would be won sooner...and some of those who fought and died might be saved.

But equally, it was possible that any shift could distort events in Voldemort's favour...and the War might not be won at all...

Besides which––things here were _different_ ; Harry was not Harry, and he would not be able to stay with his aunt, for here she had died–– 

Hermione wanted so desperately to tell him the truth, to rescue him from the pain and grief she knew he would face, the long, lonely years of not knowing that stretched out ahead of him. Yet she understood now that this very desire to save him could also cause him unknown pain and grief.

"You can't tell me." Remus shook his head. "Of course. I shouldn't have asked, I don't know why I did."

"I'm sorry, Remus." Her voice was a little shaky, and her breath, when she exhaled. "You asked if there was anything you could do...you will. You'll do everything you need to do, everything the Order needed. Never doubt that."

She unfolded herself and reached out to touch his knee. His warm hand covered hers, thumb caressing her skin.

"Thank you for that."

Hermione rose onto her knees to lean into his kiss, feeling the scratch of his stubble against her palm. Her heart was slowly regaining itself, thinking this line of questioning over, when Remus spoke again.

"I just wondered...one other thing."

"What is it?"

"You're twenty-one," he said. She tilted her head to one side, waiting for him to elaborate. "You were twenty-one where you came from, and you came almost twenty years back. And I'm twenty-one now."

"Right."

"So I'm...what, I'm forty, where you came from?"

She swallowed. "Yes."

"Forty..." Remus began. "I didn't even think..."

He looked astonished, and almost betrayed by his future and alternate self. "I suppose I should have known..." he tried, again, but still did not finish his sentence.

Instead, he asked, "How did we know each other?"

Hermione drew away from him. "It's not really you." Her voice had taken on a reassuring tone, though she did not know if it was more for his benefit or hers. "I think I said before, that where I came from you––Remus was married to T––to someone else."

Understandably, hearing an alternate version of himself being referred to in the third person seemed to have thrown Remus.

"Right," he said. "I remember. So we––I mean, you and he never..."

"No. You––he was my p––he was older when we first met, but later we became friends. He supported me and––others, through really difficult times. He was such a good friend, and that was all. He married––someone else."

Remus was silent, taking it all in. She could only watch him, heart sore. Finally, he murmured, "And could any of this, that, still happen, here?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean––could I still meet you––the 'you' who's here, who was already here? Would _she_ and I become friends, and everything else you said?"

He spoke as if it were an entirely remote story, relevant to someone else, as if he could not make believe that all these things were or would be parts of his own life.

"It could happen," Hermione admitted.

"What a mess," Remus said then, ruefully, and it struck her to the core. She drew her knees up again, unable to look at him in that moment. Yes, what a mess she had put him in––what right had she had to force him into this situation? And to have given him this knowledge of a possible future, however similar or dissimilar it might turn out in this reality?

"I'm sorry––I shouldn't've put all this on you––"

He looked up at her at once, and moved swiftly to grip her arm, staying her further retreat.

"Please don't," he said, with such great feeling that she felt his sincerity almost as strongly as if it were something tangible. "I don't regret a thing about us, Hermione. And I––I can only hope that you don't, either."

She told him, softly, urgently, "I don't."

She did not, if he did not. With him it had been too easy to put aside everything else. Nothing else seemed to matter when she was with him. She did not know what she would have done without him; he had made her forget, for many blissful moments, her continued and constant fading. "I just don't want to complicate things for you."

"I'll deal with everything else as it comes," Remus murmured. He reached out now to stroke her hair, her cheek, his light touch a gentle urge for her to meet his eyes again. "This––I couldn't bear to miss a moment of this. Of you."

He had brought tears to her eyes. She tried to blink them away, and he kissed the few that escaped her.

After what felt like a long time, Remus asked, "What about you?"

"Me?"

"What about––what will you do if we, here, and then you go back and meet him...?"

"I won't be going back," she said, flatly. She knew Remus still held out hope for her, that the Ministry on the other side––the side she'd come from––would work out a solution in time to retrieve her. She looked down at their linked hands, fingers intertwined, and with her other traced his knuckles and the pale scar on the back of his hand. "It isn't possible."

Remus wordlessly gathered her into his arms, brushing his lips over her hair in apology. She let him hold her, soaking up his warmth and his silent support. She did not have any words either. She slipped her arms around him and held him, fiercely grateful that he had even let her get so close. She knew it would not have been possible in any circumstances other than the one in which they had met here. She had needed him––and he had needed someone. And now, having found each other, there seemed no question of parting.

However, as if he had heard these last thoughts, Remus asked, haltingly: "If you are fading...if you will not return...then do you..."

"Do I...?"

"Do you really want to spend your time––with me?"

"Oh, Remus," Hermione said. That self-hatred, that revulsion at himself, was back in his voice. "Will you let me?"

His eyes were naked and brimming with as much emotion as she felt filled her own heart. He kissed her, his lips at first tentative, then slowly growing in a possessiveness that flooded her with welcome warmth.

"I could never deny you." His voice was low, edged with that familiar hoarseness. Another kiss, shorter but more firmly claiming her mouth. "I'll do anything for you. Anything you need here."

His hands rose to cradle her face as he sought her lips again as if he could never have enough, and she held him tightly, her insides twisting with love and regret. She loved him; she regretted how they had come to be. She regretted that she would soon have to leave him.

 

* * *

 

The week before Christmas, Hermione came across the Nimbus. Not quite understanding why, she found herself retrieving it from the corner she'd found it in, carrying it into the living room where Remus was reading a letter, sitting on the carpet with his back against the sofa.

"Fancy a ride?"

He seemed to have been fretting, but as he looked up, his face gradually softened into a faint smile.

"James' old Nimbus."

Hermione was suddenly afraid her suggestion might have brought up painful memories, but he simply sounded wistful: "A ride? Haven't been out in ages."

They took the broom out into the back garden, where there were only woods and no prying eyes. When Remus had mounted the broom, swinging one long leg over it with ease, Hermione said, matter-of-factly, "I don't much like flying."

One of his eyebrows crept up. "Sorry?"

"I'm not a fan of flying," she repeated, though she climbed on and settled behind him on the broom. Both his eyebrows had gone up, now, and she had to laugh at the astonishment on his face as he twisted around to look at her.

"But didn't you just ask to..."

"I did." She touched the tip of his nose. "I thought it might be nice today." She did not add that she had been thinking it might be her last time, and that lasts were often on her mind these days. "And I trust you."

She had the sense that, ever perceptive, Remus had guessed at her true reasons for wanting to fly today. But he merely remarked, "That may be unwise, as you've never seen me fly." He grinned, though his eyes were soft, perhaps touched by her last words.

Hermione regretted her decision for the first few seconds, when Remus first kicked off from the ground and they were rising quickly, rising into the crisp winter air. They'd cast heating charms on themselves, but the sheer height of it sent her adrenaline rocketing more rapidly than the old Nimbus soared. After those first moments, however, Remus settled them at a constant height, and placed a reassuring hand over hers, braced on his stomach. Then––then it became quite nice. The sound of the wind in her ears, the tiny trees and frosty earth visible far below them, and Remus' solid warmth before her. She could begin to understand why they loved it so, Harry and Ron and Ginny.

She thought of the quidditch they'd played on those idle days at the Burrow, smiled at the memory of how completely terrible she'd been, and missed them all dearly. But right now, with the wind in her hair making it wilder than ever, and with Remus in her arms, she felt okay. No; better than that. Some days she woke up and still had to take a moment to believe it, but she was glad. Most days, he gave her the strength to face that which she was slowly coming to accept as inevitable.

They dismounted afterward, pleasantly chilled and windswept, and went laughingly back into the cottage. Remus started a fire, and later they made love in its heat and flickering light, languidly, lazily, mouths and fingers and palms on skin until they felt more one being than two.

"What shall we do for Christmas?"

Hermione nestled closer to Remus where they lay on the carpet, snuggled into his side and savoured the normalcy of the question––of asking a question such as this––as it left her tongue and threaded into the air of the living room, dark and warm. It was in keeping with her determination not to live out the rest of her life in perpetual mourning. She rested her chin on her hand, her hand on his chest, feeling its slow rise and fall. Remus traced shapes onto her shoulder, her collarbone.

"Ah," he said. She was surprised to see a faint grimace pass over his features. Then he reached up behind him with one hand to summon a folded piece of parchment, and when he handed it to her, she recognised it as the letter he had been reading earlier.

"This is...it's from your parents." She sat up slowly, glancing again at him. "May I?"

He nodded. He was combing his fingers through the locks of hair that fell over his forehead, his movements restive, his gaze distracted. She looked back down at the letter and read; it was written in a close, neat hand.

_Dear Remus,_

_We are very glad to hear you are doing better. We miss you already, though, yes, we know, it's not been two weeks since your visit. Won't you come and stay, at least over the holidays?_

_Love,_

_Mum & Dad_

And at the bottom, scratched in hasty ink of another colour:

_Remus, please do come. Your mother won't say it, but I fear we don't have long now._

_Dad_

Hermione swallowed, remembering from conversations back in her old world that Remus' mother had passed away shortly after James and Lily had died. It had not exactly been unexpected; she had been ill for years...but he, the older Remus, had not known just how little time she had left.

"You must go and stay with them."

"Hermione..."

She waited for him to continue, wondered why he hesitated, why there was reluctance in his face. Why was he not now at his mother's side, having read, after all, his father's words? It wasn't right.

He said, finally, "My parents have enough to worry about."

She understood at once. _Enough to worry about without me as well._

"Don't be ridiculous," she said, surprising herself as well with the hotness that burst from her tongue. "They need you, Remus. They love you. And your mother..."

Remus looked surprised, caught offguard by the reproach in her voice, then defensive. "Yes," he said. "But I'm just another burden to occupy their mind––"

"That's not true," Hermione replied at once, cutting him off.

"You don't know––"

"They're your _parents_ ––"

Remus had grown frustrated now, angry. "Look, you don't know–– _you don't know!_ I've done nothing but give her––give them more to worry about. They're far better off without me around. If I can just take care of myself––I go to see them, I do, but the less they have to deal with my condition, the better. You––you haven't seen what it's done to them, what I am. Every year I could see it, growing up I saw what it did. They're better off without me. You don't understand. You couldn't."

Hermione was shaken by the vehemence of his words, the abhorrence that seeped in when he spoke of what he was. They weren't looking at each other.

"All I know," she said, eventually, quietly, "is that I don't have the choice of spending this Christmas with my parents."


	9. In Wales

**December 1981**

There was a silence between them during which Hermione gathered herself, reaching for Remus' shirt and pulling it around her shoulders. Remus still looked angry, though his expression was now tinged with regret. For her part, she tried to comprehend what he must think of himself, that he would think it better for him to stay away rather than spend these last days with his ailing mother.

Eventually, Remus told her, somewhat stiltedly, "I'm sorry. I know you must wish..."

He trailed off, and although his words seemed sincere, she sensed that he still refused to be swayed when it came to his own parents.

"I'm sorry as well." She looked down, avoiding his eyes for now. "Remus, I...I understand that family isn't always...that sometimes family can in fact be awful, and not worth suffering through at all––but I don't think it's like that for you?" Back in her old world, Remus had never mentioned anything of the sort; he had only spoken of regret that he had not spent more time with his mother before her passing.

When he said nothing, she went on. "Your parents love you, and I honestly believe you would bring them––such joy, if you went to see them. Of course they would worry about you as well, your condition, your life, but...they seem to think it's worth it. And so––perhaps you shouldn't make that choice for them."

Remus looked stubborn. He spoke with conviction: "It's not worth it."

"You are," she whispered.

When she did look up, Remus was blinking back tears, the lake blue of his eyes glimmering in the firelight. With an effort, he said,

"It's not worth it. I know that. But now that she's...I just––I just want my mum to be happy when––when she––to be happy."

Hermione said, gently, "She'll be happy with you there."

She gave him back the letter, and Remus took it; he did not read it again, but she had the feeling he already knew it by heart.

Finally he said, so low she almost did not hear it, "You really think so?"

Hermione nodded, kept nodding as she pressed close again and embraced him. He had shut his eyes and she watched as a tear seeped from beneath his lashes.

"Will you come with me?"

 

* * *

 

Hermione had not been to Wales before. She had almost gone, once, as a child, but in the end her parents had decided to spend the weekend in Bristol instead of driving on.

Now she and Remus Apparated, disappearing from his cottage in the Yorkshire woods, reappearing in the front garden of another cottage, this one surrounded by forest. For a moment she thought they had not moved. Upon closer inspection, however, this cottage was far less shabby; it looked more homey, lived-in but well kept, with friendly patterned curtains visible through clean windowpanes. A Christmas wreath hung on the front door. She looked to Remus and found his face tense, but his eyes sad and soft.

"Hey," she whispered, taking his hand in hers, and he looked at her, nodded and squeezed.

As they approached, the front door rattled and then opened. A tall, grey-haired wizard clad in neat dark robes peered out at them, and though he had a greying moustache and wore spectacles where his son did not, she could see the echoes of Remus in his face.

"Remus." His father stepped out quickly to greet them, the door easing open behind him. A smile brightened his lined face as Remus walked up to meet him, and as father and son embraced, Hermione followed but hung back, smiling as she looked on.

"I'm glad you've come, son," said his father. He released Remus from the embrace, but gripped him for a while by the arm and shoulder, no doubt taking in his son's scarred and tired face. Hermione could tell that it pained him, though he made no remark on it.

"Thanks for having us, Dad," Remus murmured, and Hermione was only briefly surprised to hear the same Welsh lilt now on his tongue. She found she very much liked it. Remus took her hand, and continued, "Dad, this is Hermione. Hermione, my dad, Lyall."

"Pleasure to meet you," said Lyall warmly, and shook her hand vigorously. She could sense the sincerity in his tone. She wondered in passing how many partners Remus had brought to meet them before, if he had brought any at all.

"Thank you for inviting me as well."

"Of course," Lyall said. "Of course. Please, come in, come in..."

It was pleasantly toasty inside the house. They removed their coats, Remus stripping off his worn green jumper as well. It left his sandy hair tousled, and this, as well as the faded t-shirt he wore underneath and the old house around them, made him look for a moment even younger than his years.

"Where's Mum?" Remus asked quietly. "How is she, Dad?"

Lyall looked quietly back at his son for a moment, hazel eyes sober. "She's in the bedroom. She wants to join us outside for the evening meal, but usually these days she's in bed...she...the Healers have said a few weeks. The doctors as well."

Hermione watched Remus' throat work, stuck with emotion, and she felt helpless, able only to look on, hoping that she was not imposing.

"Remus," she said, softly, "do you want me to wait somewhere first?"

He shook his head, paused, then nodded.

"I'll wait for you. I'll just wait for everyone out here––if it's alright––" she added.

"Of course, Hermione." Lyall led her into the living room, a cosy, neatly kept room lined with bookshelves. Despite the plentiful shelving, there were still various books laying out on the end tables, and on the sofa and armchairs arranged around a large fireplace. "Please, make yourself at home...and I must apologise for the circumstances..."

"Please," she interjected, quickly. "There's no need at all. I'll wait here until you've all had a chance to talk."

Remus gave her a nod and a not-quite smile through the doorway before following his father out of her sight. After a moment she heard the soft click of a door opening somewhere down the hall, and then the soft sounds of greeting and conversation. Walking around the low coffee table, Hermione sat down on the fabric-covered sofa, looking around the room and taking in the sight of a mixed muggle-magic household.

There was a small pewter cauldron next to the fireplace, and something that looked like a flobberworm living in a small glass tank by the window. There were also electronics; her heart felt as if it squeezed a little tighter when she saw that the Lupins owned the same videocasette player her parents did, kept on a shelf just below their modest television. On top of the television was a small figurine of a mushroom, and in the bookshelf beside it, muggle tomes sat side by side with magical publications. It made Hermione smile; it looked just like her own bookshelf at home, and like Remus'––the Remus she had known first.

Beside her on the sofa lay an open envelope. She recognised Remus' handwriting inside, the blue ink, and remembered him writing out the reply, answering his parents' letter. He had still been reluctant, she had seen it in his face, but he had done it anyway. She found herself hoping fervently that she had done the right thing in pressing him to come. She was an outsider; it was true that she did not and could not understand the situation as he did, had never seen the effect of his condition on his parents, his family. Far lesser things had torn families apart.

"Hermione?"

She looked up to see Remus back in the doorway, leaning on the doorframe with one hand. He was smiling a little, though she could still see the tension and worry in his forehead. "Will you come say hello to Mum?"

She rose, going to him and letting him lead her down the carpeted hall, past framed, moving photographs hung lovingly along the walls. She caught glimpses of family photographs, of Remus as a teenager, as an infant. Then they reached a door upon which Remus knocked softly, then eased open. She went in and was met by the gentle smile of Remus' mother.

"Hermione, my mum, Hope," she heard Remus say from behind her.

"It's so lovely to meet you," Hermione said, and meant it. Hope lay in bed, under covers the colour of autumn leaves. She looked pale, weak, much as her son did after the moon. Her blonde hair was mostly silver, her blue eyes weary but still attentive. She had a quiet beauty; and, Hermione thought, Remus looked like her, down to the kindness that seemed etched into her features.

"I'm glad you could come, Hermione." Hope's voice was soft, fatigued, barely above a whisper. Her eyes flickered to her son, a gaze tinged with amusement, as she said, "And thank you for bringing Remus along."

"Mum," started Remus. Hermione returned Hope's amused glance.

Remus helped his mother out to the dining room for dinner, Lyall anxiously leading the way, readying her favourite chair at the table. Lyall took a seat beside his wife, leaving Remus and Hermione to settle down across from them.

"You look well, son," Lyall said.

Remus nodded, looking down at the table. "I've been feeling better. A little more..." He trailed off.

"I'm glad." Hope smiled at her son, then at Hermione. Again her eyes reminded Hermione of her son's, not just their colours but the way they seemed to see and say things that remained unspoken. How surreal it felt to be sitting here with Remus and his parents, and how strange, especially, that it felt so natural. The evening passed by very enjoyably; she felt cocooned in the warmth and wit that it was so clear Remus had inherited from his parents. Hope joined in the conversation, and laughed and joked, but sometimes Hermione still caught Remus watching his mother, sorrow and torment in his eyes.

Late at night it was just the two of them again, sitting with mugs of mulled wine on the bed in Remus' old bedroom.

"This house is from after we stopped moving around all the time because of me." Remus was looking around the room, his expression edged with melancholy. "I only stayed here some weeks in the summer, when I wasn't spending it with––them." James and Sirius, she thought he meant, and Peter.

"Your parents are lovely," she told him, honestly. He looked down at his wine and nodded.

"Yes, they are."

She hesitated, but ventured, "And they...they're so glad to see you."

Remus smiled, though it was a little twisted at one corner. But he only said, "They really like you, too."

"Really?"

"Yes."

He took her hands in his, mugs duly banished to the kitchen, and simply sat there looking down for a moment, tracing her knuckles and the tops of her fingers with his thumbs. She felt a lump rise in her throat at the expression on his face, the twitch in the corner of his mouth.

"Thank you for making me come and see her. I was being a fool." He lifted her hand, fusing it with his, so that their fingers interlocked. Hermione drew his hand close and pressed her lips to his fingertips, the side of his wrist, feeling the soft pulse beneath his skin. She watched a tear fall onto his outstretched arm, followed by another that he tried to hide in his sleeve. Her own heart felt sore, thinking as she was of her own parents; how much did they know of what had happened to her? Had they been told anything at all? Would they forgive her for this, for leaving them again?

"You weren't being a fool, Remus." And she thought, but did not say: _you were being what you've always been, feeling what you've always felt, that self-loathing taught to you by the world._

He wiped roughly at his eyes, impatient with himself, and tried for a smile. "Thank you for coming with me."

"Of course." She matched his desire for a lighter tone: "Just please don't wake me for that three-in-the-morning Christmas service."

Remus laughed. "My parents were only teasing. We don't go to that." He gave her a kiss, added playfully: "We always go for the four-in-the-morning. Get much more sleep that way."

As they held each other that night, and the nights after that, she thought that her love could not save him from the heartbreak he had faced, and would soon face again; nor could his love save her; but she could not imagine their not having found one another.


	10. The Months

**January 1982**

Hope passed on a snowcapped late January morning, her husband and son by her bedside. Hermione was there to witness it, and she was there as father and son quietly planned a funeral, with reddened eyes and voices soft yet thick with emotion. She was there, too, to accompany Remus back to the Yorkshire cottage they had made their home.

She let them in and Remus went into the bathroom; she heard the shower start. She made tea and sat at the kitchen table. His grief was a tangible presence; it seeped from the edges of the bathroom door and made its way into the rest of the house. They had come too thick and fast, the blows, his friends one after another and now his mother. There was a black poetry in it: he had lost hope.

But, she thought, they could not think of it like that; she would not. Rather, Hope would always be with him.

And she, Hermione, stayed with him, too. She went to the Department to work with the _infinitum_ jar––because she was dying, yes, but she would rather die trying––then she came home at night to be with him. She was never quite sure how many jobs he was working at any one time. They were all temporary, especially the muggle work he picked up. She had the feeling he was trying to drown his grief in work, and she understood that; she was the same way.

His mother's funeral was a small, quiet ceremony, held two weeks after her death. She had asked to be cremated, and her ashes scattered in the Welsh forest where she and Lyall had first met. Remus accompanied his father, straight-backed, too pale, and afterward Hermione held him, felt him draw shuddering breaths in her arms. That night he stayed by the window despite the moonlight, and she knew he was thinking of Hope.

Sometimes Hermione wondered if she ought to be doing this; if she were perhaps trying to escape her own sorrows by submerging herself in his. She never quite reached a satisfactory answer on this, but what she did know was that she simply couldn't fathom _not_ being there for him. These feelings that had taken root in her heart precluded that as a choice. She had come to care for him immensely.

The first moon after Hope's passing wrecked Remus even more than what she had come to accept as usual. There was more blood, more deep scratches almost beyond her power to help him heal, as if the wolf, too, was affected by his despair and channeled it into immeasurable rage. It left a new scar on his face, a nick just above his cheekbone, as if he'd been burnt by a tear and it had seared itself into his skin as a permanent reminder. It was an acid red when she first tried to mend it, before fading into the old silver characteristic of werewolf scars.

"I'm sorry," were the first words he said to her that morning after the moon. His next, "You should leave me."

"Why?"

"Why?" His eyes fell shut and he turned away from her touch. They were in the bathroom again, and he was bleeding still, cold in the tub with her leaning over the side. "I can do nothing for you, Hermione...I...you should be out there with them, not...not watching me fall apart."

"With them? I don't––"

"I'm a waste of your time, Hermione."

 _And you've not got much left._ She did not need to be a Legilimens to read the unspoken words in his face. She bristled.

"I think I'm perfectly capable of deciding how to spend my own time."

She wiped the skin around his wound, smearing a streak of white through the iron-tanged redness, and he hissed, the pain momentarily distorting his pale face, his eyes shut tight.

Still he continued.

"I can't be there for you."

"You are."

She looked down to find his eyes open again, fixed on hers. He shook his head. "Am I?"

"Yes," she said. "You were, you are. So let me, now."

One of his hands found hers, closed around it. "I'm very glad you're with me, Hermione."

Tears rose at once to her eyes. "Me too."

She tried to rise, to begin to wash the blood from him, but he kept his grip, stayed her. He said, "I'd given up when I met you." His eyes were clear, naked.

"What?"

"I'd given up," he repeated. "I just...I'd had enough. I felt as if there wasn't any point in going on. Then there you were, that night." He was smiling softly, the faintest quirk of his lips.

"Remus..."

"It's true." He squeezed her hand, shaking his head very slightly. "You...you saved my life."

She bent closer to kiss him and felt his arms go around her, the embrace his silent promise: that now he would be here for her. And she thanked him for it, for his quiet strength, in that same silent language they shared. If it were true that she had a year or less to live, then she had only three quarters of it left, now that three months had passed without any sign of hope at the Department.

Remus could not save her life, she knew, but he would make these last months of it infinitely more endurable.

 

* * *

 

**February 1982**

"How was he?"

"I think a little better." Remus shrugged out of his cloak, smiling just a little, brushing the snow––Welsh snow, she thought, for it had not snowed here today––from his hair. "He looked like he'd had a few decent sleeps."

"He must have been happy to see you."

Remus met her eyes and nodded, his head staying a little bowed. "Yes, he was."

She bit her lip, until he gave her another small smile.

"I'm so glad, Remus..."

"So am I." He moved across the room to Hermione, pressing a kiss to her temple. "How are you feeling?"

"No problems tonight." She'd had her potion, chased off for now the headache which had threatened an approach. "I found these, by the way." She gestured at the stack of gramophone records she'd come across in one of his shelves, an assortment of muggle and wizarding music. "Can you play me something?"

Remus' eyes lit up. "Certainly." Crossing the room, he knelt and spread out a few of the records on the floor, fingertips skimming over covers. "This––" he held one up "––do you like this?"

Hermione shrugged, smiling at the light of enthusiasm in his young, tired face she loved so well. "Show me."

Remus sent the disc to the dusty record player with a smart flick of his wrist, and paused before he let it start playing. Looking around the room, he flicked his wand again, casting the room into a darkness that was near pitch-black until the curtains opened to let in a faint evening light. The night sky outside was dark, too, almost moonless, lit only by the stars suspended high above the treetops.

She began, "What..."

"It sounds best in the dark." She saw him come to join her, felt his solid weight easing down beside her on the carpet, the faint starlight catching his face as he turned toward her. There was a slow, soft curve to his lips and his eyes were dark and tender. "Even more beautiful."

Caught by his gaze in that dim light, transfixed, she heard the first notes rising into the night air, notes from a piano. Light, almost hesitant, yet surely growing; melting into a slow, exquisite crescendo, until the strands thickened with a richness that expanded to fill both her ribcage as well as the darkened room, permeating every shadow and corner within it and imbuing it all with meaning. It raised goosebumps across her skin and dug into the soft flesh of her heart. One of her hands were clenched; she released it. The melody was to her so delicate and bittersweet, so fierce and powerful, so slowly and eventually accepting, that she found hot tears had filled her eyes. Her heart was full, full to bursting with the music and with memories, with grief and hope and love, for him, Remus, who sat with her and held her in that dark room.

Closing her eyes, feeling the tears escape, she ran a hand down his arm and kissed him, drank him in, every shadow and corner of him.

 

* * *

 

**March 1982**

It was two days before Remus' twenty-second birthday, and they were in bed again, breathless. Still she could feel him against her, hard against her stomach. The next day was the full moon, which meant Remus would not be up to much at all on the day of his birthday.

"I'm used to it," he was saying. She pressed him to the mattress and climbed on top of him, sitting across his hips, gazing down at the afternoon sunlight that fell across his face as she brushed his hair back.

"Used to it?"

"Yes. It's also been the very day of my birthday more often than I'd like."

She shook her head, but returned the wry smile on his lips.

"So," he went on, conversationally, "were you planning to move at all?"

She grinned. He entered her again and she lost herself in the moment, the pure heady sensations, his heat and flesh inside her and their minds so fully concentrated on nothing else but _this_ , _them_. Remus watched her, eyelids heavy, his hands caressing the flare of her hips, slipping lower to squeeze her. It was building; she rode him, sinking deeper onto him, gasping with the pleasure of it. When he followed her, spilled into her again, she felt such an overwhelming love for him she could hardly bear it. He held her close, pulling her down into an embrace where she could feel the pounding of their hearts.

 _I love you_ , she thought. _I love you, Remus Lupin_.

Later that night as they lay in the dark, gazing up at the ceiling and the night sky framed in the window, she thought how comforting it was simply to lay here and listen to his quiet breathing beside her. They had talked as night fell outside, and now this silence seemed another understanding of each other. In the dark she thought of the song Remus had played for her, and felt for a moment the emotion that had welled within her then.

And he was humming it now––that bitter, sweet melody.

"Oh, Remus," she said into the night, a tremor in her voice. He rose up on his elbow beside her and leaned down to press a slow, gentle kiss to her lips. He hummed it against her cheek, and her skin sang with it.

"I love you," she murmured. The melody lingered in her ears. She could feel him smiling.

"I love you too, Hermione."

 

* * *

 

**April 1982**

"And I always told her, 'I'm ever so glad you're not dealing with the more dangerous cases, just blithering idiots who've no idea who they are, though that's bad enough'!"

Hermione met Remus' eye and had to bite the insides of her cheeks to hold in her laughter. He had said nothing, nor even really moved, but the set of his mouth and the faintest cock of an eyebrow told her all she needed to know. They had silently decided, together, to be amused rather than angered by the currently ongoing display of ignorance.

"Oh, I hate those blithering idiots," Hermione agreed. "Especially the truly unbearable ones who've gone and somehow lost themselves in time..."

"Yes!" expostulated the old wizard. He sat opposite them in the waiting room at St. Mungo's. "Idiots, the lot of them!" He was, they had gathered, the father of Amelia, Hermione's Dislocation specialist. He seemed rather displeased at both her choice of specialty as well as the fact that he was having to wait to see her in the hospital waiting room.

"And I despise those 'dangerous cases'," Remus added. "So irresponsible of them, getting themselves bitten and infected by...things."

"Yes, yes!" The wizard shook his head in a sort of pitying fury. "Who do they think they are? As if it's the burden of the rest of us to take care of nitwits like them?"

Remus raised his eyebrows at Hermione, the briefest expression crossing the face she had come to know so well, and she could no longer contain herself. The old wizard gazed at her, perplexed, as she pressed a hand to her lips and attempted to stifle the laughter issuing from her mouth. Remus joined in––putting on a look of bemusement and mock disapproval––until she found herself gasping for air.

"What...I don't... _well_..." the wizard muttered, crossly, which didn't help matters.

"Sorry about her," Remus said apologetically. "She's here to see the Healer for some more potions to help sort out her Dislocation."

The wizard stared at her, mouthed wordlessly.

"You mean she's...you...you're..."

"Yes," Hermione managed. "I'm afraid I'm a blithering idiot."

"I suppose," Remus put in, thoughtfully, "the chances are rather high, that anyone in this particular waiting room might just be a blithering idiot."

"Dad?" Amelia had emerged from her office, looking confused as she sent off her morning patient, a plump witch who was clutching several vials of viscous potion. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to see _you_!" exclaimed the old wizard, shooting Hermione a dirty look. "You haven't returned my owl...you know, about the _transfer_ opportunity..."

Amelia heaved a sigh. "I've told you already, countless times, I don't want to transfer. I've got patients to see now, Dad. Hermione, come on through."

Hermione followed Amelia into her office. The Healer shut the door firmly, leaving Hermione a last image of the red-faced old wizard now glaring daggers at a placid Remus. Some minutes later, she exited with her pain and sleep potions to find the old wizard a good deal paler and now sitting a good distance away from Remus. After they had Apparated home, she asked, "What on earth did you say to the poor man?"

Remus glanced at her. "Might have let slip that I occasionally spend some time in the Dangerous Creatures ward."

She bit her lip, smiling. "Remus, you didn't."

He allowed himself a little grin, now. "I dunno, it was something of a relief opening up to him."

She laughed and kissed him. Sometimes she felt so happy with him, so content, that it seemed like a grand, cosmic joke, to have given her such happiness yet only coupled with the knowledge that she had months left to live. It still brought her back down with a jolt when she remembered.

Remus had framed her face in his hands. He did not need to ask her what was wrong; he knew. Somehow he always knew. In the months they had spent in each others' company, she and Remus had come to share a deep, instinctive understanding.

"I'm alright, Remus."

"You're not," he murmured. "But...that's alright."

She closed her eyes. For a moment her heart faltered; sometimes he spoke as if he knew her very soul, knew what she feared and where it hid within her. Somehow he always found the right words, including when he spoke none at all.

Her headaches had worsened of late; now it took more than one potion to keep them at bay at all. It did not help with her search for a return. Sometimes in her office she would simply sit and stare into the lights that glimmered in the jar, willing it to reveal its secrets. There were no clues, however, no puzzle pieces. All that lay on the other side of the chasm, in her old time; all the evidence she needed, locked in the very place she sought to reach. She could do little but hope fervently that someone could piece things together on the other side; if indeed anyone was even trying.

If she just had more time, and her mind back, healthy and unaching, perhaps she might be able to save herself. But there were simply too many possibilities. She was sure she could transport herself in time; and she had developed an idea now how to transverse even timelines; but to travel back to her own exact timeline, one out of countless billions, and also pinpoint the time or at least thereabouts from which she'd been sent––that was impossible. She needed a tether, a link, a magic to trace. She needed the other jar.

She had told herself this many times by now, but each retelling still wounded her. For she had to accept the undeniable: that there was simply nothing for her to do.

Remus sensed more than she told him about all of this. He was there through it all, the good days and the bad and the worse. He was always there, and he let her be for him all that he was for her.

How could one make the unbearable bearable? It was an oxymoron; and yet he did.


	11. Marks

**July 1982**

It was hot, finally, and bright. Remus lay on his back in a moment of sunlight, and Hermione stood over him, looked down at him, and thought how much she loved him.

"Come and join me." Remus patted the thick grass beside him. "Ever so warm and only slightly damp."

She gave him her hand, knowing, and he tugged her down, catching her in his arms with a smile that shone as bright as any sun. She pressed a chaste kiss to those lips, raising herself to take in the playful shine of his eyes and the messiness of his hair. Above them, around them, the wind teased leafy branches and birds sang to each other across the treetops. The woods around their cottage were full of light and life.

Hermione rolled over to lie on her back beside Remus, gazing up at the blue sky with its clouds that passed swiftly over like the thoughts in her mind. She didn't see, but felt Remus take her hand, so that they lay together, linked at their clasped hands, listening to the leaves and wind and birdsong, listening to their quiet breathing.

"Beautiful," she uttered; the breeze caught her offering and lifted it, carried it higher to share with the rest of the little island of calm they had become part of.

They lay there a little longer, until Remus sat up beside her and she found herself missing their connection, his hand in hers. But he smiled down at her, briefly haloed by the sunlight that filtered down around them. She beckoned him in with a hand, so that he leaned in over her, closer, closer, until he was close enough for her to kiss.

It was a beautiful summer day, and she was with him.

He lifted his lead a few inches and gazed into her eyes. "What are you thinking?" he murmured, for she was thinking of something far away; these days they could read each other like a favourite book.

"I'm thinking..." she searched his eyes, his face. "What really matters? When you know...it's going to happen soon?"

She knew he had understood, that she spoke of the death that awaited her. That awaited everyone, eventually, but approached much sooner for her.

"And...what matters?"

He was choosing his words carefully; she couldn't bring herself to resent him for that. He was not treating her differently aside from this. She knew that words mattered to Remus, that his were always carefully chosen.

"I don't know." She looked back to the treetops, gently swaying high above them. "I know what I can't change...and I've already left everything behind...all I have here is _now_ , none of then. That's all I have. There's...there's no use at all thinking about what things I'd change."

"All you have is now."

"Yes. Just present...no past. But then..." she tried a smile. "Isn't that what they say really matters, 'the present'?"

"Yes," Remus said, brushing loose tendrils of hair back from her face. "So they say."

Half speaking to herself, sorting out the puzzle of emotions and thoughts in her mind, Hermione said, "Then there's no point asking what it's all been for."

"No?"

"No. Because perhaps it's only ever been 'for' the present? It isn't for anything? I've never been someone who...needed to leave a _mark_ , really, I think...though I do want to do something that matters, make changes, you know. Well, I did. But not really leaving a mark that lasts forever, and so on."

He was smiling down at her, a slow, quiet smile that warmed her to her very toes.

"But you have left a mark, Hermione."

She touched his lips with her fingertips, until his smile faded but the look in his eyes remained.

"What really matters," she murmured, catching his wrist and kissing his palm, "I don't know, but sometimes I feel like it's us."

When it came down to it, perhaps it was simply true. What really mattered in the end was love, in moments, in whatever form, family and friends and lovers. She had little here, but she did have love, and what love.

"I love you," Remus told her, softly, as simply as if he'd really read her mind. She tugged him down to capture his lips with hers, to taste the love he had declared to her.

Everybody would face these questions one day, sooner or later; when the end was in sight, when it was real, no longer a matter of _one day_ , these were the eternal questions. What really mattered? What were the things one would hold on to, do more of?

Everything had made sense, once. But her dislocation into this world had changed it all. Before, despite the fear and pain of everything she'd gone through with the war, in the end it had come to make sense; perhaps she'd _made_ it make sense, consciously or otherwise. Perhaps it was simply what people did, to survive. There had been meaning in everything that had happened to her, in what she'd done, in the choices she'd made. That meaning was no longer so clear; for she'd done all that only to end up here, in a place in time and space she'd never have ever dreamt of being. It forced her to seek her meaning now, not in the past, not looking back.

What she had now were moments; moments of sunshine, moments of grass, of blue sky, rain, happiness, joy, longing, despair, love. And moments with him.

Even if nothing she had ever done would ever matter in this slightly-shifted world, she had these moments.

It was strange, but now that she had been given only a short time to live, everything was becoming clear. These moments were what mattered; were what she should have done more of; were what she would now focus her remaining days upon. That Remus was here to share these moments, and to be such a vital part of them, was her great stroke of fortune.

She found herself filled with tears and bursting with happiness thinking of how much she loved him, this man who lay beside her and held her in his arms and kissed her.

"You're brilliant," she whispered against his lips.

"You," he whispered back, so close to her, never close enough.

They were silent for a moment, before he said, "You...you've changed...I couldn't imagine feeling this way before I'd met you, Hermione."

"You don't have to..."

"I've never been happy like this." His eyes were closed. When he opened them again the intensity in them took her breath away. "And you make me better...a better..." He was speaking now, she thought, of his parents, of Hope. His hand found her cheek, his thumb gently brushing its curve. "I love you, Hermione."

They made love there in the warmth of the sun, kissed and touched and held each other. They came together, sought a familiar rhythm as they moved together. She felt so close to him, so full, and she could feel his heart beating afterward as they came down from it.

"Oh," she heard him say. She sought his gaze, but Remus was looking past her eyes, at where her shoulder joined her neck. "I––I bit you," he said, in a rush. He looked stricken, though she felt nothing different in the place where he looked. She touched her fingers there, then, and felt the faintest of nicks on her skin. He must have caught her only just with his teeth.

"It's nothing, Remus." She took her hand away; it did feel a little warm now, but it did not alarm her. "Don't worry about it."

"But I...it could..."

Remus reached out, rushed the pad of his thumb across the mark; his touch elicited in her a shiver that darted down her spine.

"Oh," she gasped. "That felt––strange." And good, she thought, and did not know what he would make of that.

His brow was furrowed with worry. "I'm so sorry––I've never, I should never have––"

"It's _alright_ , Remus. I'll let you know if it starts feeling funny, but...it's fine for now."

The mark stayed warm. She looked at it later that afternoon in the bathroom mirror, but it was only the tiniest of scratches, faintly silvery and no longer than the span of a sickle coin. She found herself vaguely interested on an intellectual level, considering the yet unresearched areas of werewolf magic, but then again, she had more pressing areas of magic to contemplate, if she did at all. Time was running low, and she had resolved to spend her last weeks not in the office but making the most of what she and Remus had built here.

Remus had remained remorseful and frustratingly cautious around her for the rest of the day. He was still quiet when they sat down for the evening meal, and Hermione caught his guilty eyes on her neck when she looked up.

"Honestly, Remus. Try to forget about it."

He nodded, though not as if he truly agreed, then looked down at his plate and nudged at his potatoes half-heartedly. She was just beginning to contemplate lightheartedly when exactly Remus had started to learn to cook––because he certainly hadn't yet––when his soft voice broke into her thoughts.

"I understand if you can't forgive me."

She looked up, startled. "Why would you say that?"

His eyes were drifting away from her, tugged aside by some invisible compulsion. "You don't have to pretend." He laid down his knife and fork with a clatter and she saw the faint tremble of his hands where they rested on the chipped surface of the wooden dining table.

"Have I been pretending? What am I pretending?"

"I––I did _that_ to you," he spat. There was an ugly emotion in his eyes now, when she met them for a brief second. "Don't pretend it's alright, because it's not fucking alright."

Hermione sat and watched him, her food now equally abandoned. She said, "You can't tell me what I feel––I'm not pretending."

But he wasn't listening. "Your last days here and I've ruined them––"

Ignoring the pang she felt at this reminder of her numbered days, she cut in: "You know as well as I do that werewolves don't infect in human form."

"Yes, but there are other effects from a bite––"

"Remus, don't do this to yourself––don't worry, it's––" she reached for his hand, trying to stroke it in reassurance, but he pulled it away, out of her reach.

"You don't understand!" he burst out. "I can't not worry, what if I've done something to you? You've no idea what it's like, every time, not knowing what you've done, if you've––"

He had half risen from the table and she found herself looking up into his fierce face, her mouth dry. She saw something like shame swiftly descend over the fury in his eyes. He stood fully, then, his chair scraping back unpleasantly, and went from the room. She began to rise, but heard him slam out of the house. She sat back down.

She didn't understand, did she? No one truly could, who wasn't themself a werewolf. That fear, that dread, that the bloodthirsty animal that took over your body had succeeded in infecting another with the same curse––she had never experienced that and never would. She had only seen it, written across Remus' white face.

Perhaps she could have spoken to him more about it, the mark he'd given her; she truly had not been pretending not to care, but she had failed to consider how it must have affected him, too...

"I'm sorry."

She looked up. Remus was standing at the doorway, his pale face pained and ashamed.

"I'm sorry I raised my voice. And I shouldn't've made it about me...you're the one who..." His voice caught, and he faltered.

"I'm sorry, too, Remus." Hermione looked down, weighing her words. "I didn't want you to worry, so I just didn't..."

"That's not your fault," Remus told her, quickly.

"Let's talk about it," she said.

"Not if––not if you don't want to."

"I'm fine with it." She tried a smile, now. "Come sit down, Remus."

He took the chair beside hers, heavily. She took his hands and held them.

"I wasn't pretending, Remus. I didn't think it was a big deal, and I still don't. Maybe it's because of what I've seen––I've seen a friend, who's had marks far worse than this, and he's fine. It doesn't hurt. I don't feel any different. It's just a scratch, a little one. And you certainly didn't mean to do it."

"I've made this all about me, somehow," was what Remus said. "I bit...I bit you, and then I shouted at you and ran off." His lips tugged up a little at one corner, but only after Hermione had smiled. "I'm glad to hear about your friend...I was so afraid I'd ruined..."

"That you'd ruined my life," Hermione finished for him. "Well, you haven't."

Remus squeezed her hands. "I don't deserve you."

"Oh, Remus," she said, sadly. After a moment she tried a smile again. "But don't you see how that puts me in a very difficult position?"

He watched her, the tilt of his head his silent question.

"Because now I have to be very conceited indeed and say yes, yes, you _do_ deserve me, darling," she went on.

Remus gave her a faint smile.

"I love you, Remus," she added. "If you were the wolf half the month I'd still love you."

Remus' hands tightened on hers, his eyes brightened with a fierce emotion. "Did I tell you that? In the other time?"

"Tell me what?"

"What you said. Half the time?"

"No," she said, confused by the question.

"My mum said something like that." She waited, transfixed by the look on his face: "She told me once...even if I were always that way...she would still love me." He looked disbelieving, as if he couldn't understand it.

Hermione swallowed; her heart ached for him. "I know what she means."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays, dear readers, and all the best for the coming new year! Thank you for reading this far, and for all the kind and lovely comments that have kept me going.


	12. Close

**August 1982**

Wouldn't it be heaven if this could last forever?

Or perhaps it was a product of her shortened life. In any case, she had never done this before: had never sat and truly imagined what it might be like in the future, to have this man as her partner in life, to always be by his side, facing the world together...perhaps, in time, starting to build a family together, a world of their own.

It would never happen, of course. Not for them.

"How are you feeling?"

She looked up from her nesting place in their squashy old armchair and gave him a faint smile.

"Like shite. Tired. But better."

Her headaches had grown in intensity of late, and sometimes she found herself lost in long-gone memories, as if they'd been dredged up by the shifting of plates in her mind. It did not help, either, that she had begun to feel nauseous at times, a new symptom to join the old ones.

Remus knelt and embraced her, sliding his arms around her waist, resting his head softly on her belly and then her lap. She relaxed into his touch, running her fingers, through his hair, making him shiver as she traced the shell of his ear.

"Better?"

"Better."

He rose to bring their faces level, bracing his weight on each arm of the chair, then leaned in to kiss her lips.

"I'm glad." Before straightening, he went on, "You would tell me? If things feel worse?"

"Yes, Remus. Thank you," she added, touching his hand.

She didn't have long. They were both exquisitely aware that only a few weeks remained. From the outside looking in, she might have wondered at their continued routines––surely she ought to be out there, discovering something, doing mad things, burning things down––for why should they stay when she had to go? Yet from the inside, there was no greater comfort than this routine that was their life, when so often nowadays she stopped to think and cherish a certain moment that had just passed.

She did think about whether she had any last wishes, things she wanted to do before her time came. Some––to make the grand discoveries she'd dreamt of in her other life, to work with the communities and organise––some she no longer had time to achieve. Others––spending time with her loved ones––were still partially achievable. It was true that she'd left everyone behind in that other time, but here she still had Remus, and...

And she wanted to see her parents again.

Hermione admitted this to Remus that night as they lay in bed. His hand found hers in the dark and held on.

"Not to talk, of course," she said, quietly. "Just...see them." One more time. One last time.

After a pause, his voice found her:

"Do...do you want me to go with you?"

"Yes." She squeezed his hand. "If you don't mind."

"Of course not," came Remus' reply, fiercely warm. He did not say it, but she understood that he would do anything for her these last weeks.

"Thank you." She felt for him in the dark and nestled into him, tangling their legs together, breathing in his clean warm scent. His arm wrapped around her, his hand rubbing lazily the back of her neck, her shoulders. Tingles swept down her spine when his thumb brushed against the silvery scar, barely visible now, that he had given her. It did not trouble her, merely a constant warmth that she had already learnt to tune out.

"Could we go tomorrow?"

"Yes, of course."

* * *

 

They came home with her in the afternoon. She was holding her father's hand, babbling about something, and her father was humouring her. Her mother carried the old handbag Hermione remembered so well, the one she'd been so fond of. She had only given it up one summer in France, when finally it had fallen apart, releasing amongst other things two unopened packages of floss and one broken half of a plaster dental mold ( _'so that's where that got to...'_ ).

"They're the same," Hermione said, watching as her mother sat down on the tiny park bench. "Just the same." She blinked back tears, but she was glad she had come. She was glad she could say goodbye, in a way.

"And that's me," she added, unnecessarily, giving Remus a smile. He looked torn between sadness and gladness that she was happy.

"You've not changed a bit," he said, and she laughed, softly. The two of them were at the other end of the small park, temporarily spelled into invisibility. She must not be seen.

"You're so very much younger than me," Remus said now in a quiet voice. He looked sombre, a little far off, and she knew he was thinking of the time she'd come from.

" _I'm_ not, am I?" she murmured, nudging him.

He exhaled, then tried a smile. "Yes." He was looking at her parents, now. "They're the same? It's not a little different here?"

She watched them, her mum and dad, younger than she'd ever remembered seeing them. "Not that I can tell, just by looking. Of course, they've probably named me Henry instead."

Remus had to cover his mouth, then, and she found herself glad she could joke, still, no matter how difficult things were.

She and Remus sat there until they left, her family and herself, and she bid them a silent goodbye as they went, disappearing up the street. Afterward she and Remus walked away a little distance before Disapparating.

"Thank you," she said again, in the middle of their quiet dinner at the cottage. "For coming with me. It must have been strange, I know..."

Remus shook his head. "Don't worry..."

He trailed off, setting down an uneaten bite of food. "Hermione..."

"Yes?"

"I'll miss you."

She swallowed, the food in her mouth suddenly wooden.

"Oh, Remus..."

She put down her fork, trembling in her hand, and he leaned across the table and kissed her in a fervent rush, one hand on the back of her neck, pulling her in, in. She returned his desperate kisses, her hands running through his hair and then tugging fistfuls of the front of his shirt. He inhaled her, deeply, his hair mussed from her hands and his shirt crumpled when finally they broke apart.

She would miss him. She loved him.

"I'm so lucky," she whispered, "to have you. I just want to be with you until...until. I'll miss you, Remus. I will. I love you. So much."

Her cheeks were wet when he kissed her again, and again, each kiss a promise, an answer, a goodbye. He was with her. And if Remus was with her, she thought, she needed nothing else.


	13. The Swan

**September 1982**

Out here with Remus, under the stars, she found a quiet peace that soothed her tired spirit.

Above them, Cygnus spread its timeless wings, facing down the milky river that crossed the sky. Hermione spread her own arms wider, higher, until her fingertips brushed Remus'. She took deep, deliberate breaths of the night air. The moon, half full, cast a silvery glow down below. Remus' face was half in shadow, half in light, a temporary boundary running the length of his nose, the centre of his lips.

"Does it bother you?" She traced a finger along the transient line, watching it shift as he turned his face toward her. "This light."

"Sometimes."

He kissed the travelling fingertip as it journeyed across his lips, and after a pause spoke again. "These days...it reminds me of us."

Hermione smiled and kissed him. Her head ached as it had all week, a dull throbbing that could no longer be constrained by any spell or potion. Her time was almost up.

Calm, almost sleepy, she lay down again by his side, gazing up into the heavens once more. For a moment she thought she could hear the distant sound of music, the music he had shown her that evening in the darkness.

The past few months ran through her mind, dream-like, blending into the rest of her life––the time Before––as if her two worlds were becoming one.

"The Swan," Remus murmured, lifting a hand to trace its shape in the cool air. She looked at it and wondered if it was lonely. It did not seem so; it covered the heavens with a sureness that it belonged, that its given place was exactly where it always had to be.

Then Remus took her hand, and she recalled having once read, long ago, that swans tended to mate for life.

 

* * *

 

She had not been to her office all week, and had not sent word. Pyrmont sent her an owl after the eighth day of her absence, a letter full of understanding and condolences, and urging her to seek treatment at St. Mungo's.

"Let me take you there," Remus said at once, when she told him about the letter.

"Soon," she said. "But not yet."

Not whilst she could still find moments of peace here, with him in this cottage. She could see the worry and grief in his face, in unguarded moments, though usually he hid it well. She preferred when they were both at peace, sitting out together under the stars. The scar he'd left on her shoulder always felt warm in the cooling night air, and she had come to think of it as a mark of his love.

They made love for the last time on a sunlit afternoon. Remus kissed every inch of her, from the corner of her lips to the hollow of her neck, to her scar––it burned with a fierce pleasure beneath his mouth––to her breasts and belly and the swell of her hips. She felt she had known him a lifetime. The way he looked at her as their bodies came together once more to form their whole––that intensity––how profoundly glad she was that they had found each other.

He took her over the precipice and followed her down, burying his face in the crook of her neck, his movements stilling slowly as she held him to her and kept him close. She found herself desperately unwilling to let him go. But she would have to, for she would soon leave him. The thought of it was unbearable, yet had to be borne.

When Remus brought her to St. Mungo's later that week, it felt like a dream; she could recall her arrival there, and that first meeting with him; yet it seemed an age ago.

"Don't go," she heard herself pleading.

"Never," was his hoarse reply.

He stayed by her bedside as he had said he would. He spoke to her, and when she was lucid enough she caught fragments of his murmured words. He loved her, he was changed for having loved her; she had given him hope and courage and shaken away the isolation to which he had begun to condemn himself when they had first met.

One morning, or evening, she no longer knew which, she summoned the strength to speak again.

"I'm very glad...to have met you here, Remus."

When it seemed he could not speak, she went on:

"I only wish...I wish we'd met...long ago...wish we'd had longer."

Now he managed a whisper: "It couldn't have happened any other way."

She used the corners of her lips for a smile.

"I wish...we had more time."

His eyes were shining. Was it sunlight, or candlelight, that lit his face so beautifully?

"It would never be enough."

Her days grew dim after that. Though they had said she was fading, to her it was the world that now faded around her. She was vaguely aware of it, the hospital room, the Healers, Remus' steadfast presence by her side. Potions and charms and tests, long stretches of calm and flurries of movement. Here and there, phantom words echoed through the dust-grey fog that occluded her senses. _A few days_. _Soon_. _The pain_...

_Months._

_Impossible!_

_But_

_Now..._

 

and

 

_You are the love of my life, Hermione._

 

Hermione?


	14. Wind

Her parents were crying.

They were whispering to each other––they were crying, and––

And they were here.

_She_ was here.

Where was she?

She had opened her eyes and seen a ceiling. She'd shut her eyes again. What ceiling? Whose? Where?

When?

Hermione's heart began to pound, though she lay quite still in her too-hot bed, the covers tucked in around her, her legs uncomfortably bound. Experimentally, she lifted a finger, then opened her eyes and looked down to check that it had worked. It had.

The next step, then, was to swallow and attempt to clear her throat. She did so with her eyes fixed on her parents, who were there, still there, who sat facing her in chairs at the foot of the bed. They had not yet noticed that she was awake...but they would at any moment...she would be able to speak to them again, when she had not done so in a year...she was quite sure that it was them, which would make her _back_...

Her mother saw her first, and burst into tears.

"Mum," she tried to say. Now her father turned, too, and promptly began also to cry, his tears staining the familiar dark jumper he liked to wear to the clinic. Hermione knew it by the slight imperfection at one edge; she was fairly certain now that she was Back. She was. She was back. She felt it.

She didn't know quite yet what she felt about it.

" _Hermione_ ," her mother sobbed. She was by Hermione's side now, touching her face, brushing back her hair, grasping for her hands. "You're here...you're really here...you're alright...are you, sweetheart? Are you alright? Can you tell me?"

Hermione swallowed and gazed up at her mother and father's faces, and tried to speak, but found that she could not. Instead, she cried, and could only settle for nodding fervently and endlessly in blind answer to her parents' endless questions.

A nurse came, then, saw it all, brought her water to wet her parched throat, and left to alert her Healer.

"We were so..." Her father was saying in a shaky voice. "I can't believe... After everything, for you to disappear like that..."

"Dad..." Hermione managed, finally. "Mum..."

She was back.

 

* * *

 

The people she spoke to next were her rescuers––her colleagues from the Department of Mysteries, four of them, who had retrieved her in the end. For she had been retrieved, after all; somehow.

She had been fading and they'd come just in time, so she was told. They'd finally been able to trace her and where the jar might have sent her, out of a multiverse of possibilities. They spoke too quickly, too excited to tell her all, and she knew she would need to ask again for an explanation some day when she had recovered.

"The Swedes said once six weeks had gone it's impossible to get a track on anyone's Trace...but we knew if we followed the jar's own trace..."

"Thank god we kept trying, Hermione––you were so close..."

Hermione was both disappointed and grateful when the nurse eventually chivvied them out, insisting that she needed rest and that visiting hours for non-family were over. She wanted to know, yes, and was grateful and eager to know, but she was exhausted, felt overwhelmed with the emotion of being back. The very emotion of being _alive_ ––of having survived a death that she had, in the end, come to accept.

And when her parents had bid her goodnight and she was left to herself to rest for the night, she found herself overcome with a tide of grief. For she had left him behind––had had to leave him.

Remus.

She was back, but she'd lost him.

When her hand rose automatically to the scar on her shoulder she found it cool to the touch, just a scar like any other.

 

* * *

 

She awoke to find that it was morning and still she was here, still back, in bed in St. Mungo's in the world to which she belonged. No matter that it felt as if she'd left her heart behind––she was alive.

"You're expected to make a full recovery," the Healer had told her. There would be no lasting effects from either the displacement or the fading, or so they said. For she was certain there were already indelible outcomes, etched into her very soul. But then, they were not concerned with matters of the soul.

The sun shone brightly outside the windows, the wood pigeons cooed, and it felt for all the world as if nothing at all had changed. She'd been gone for an age but everything had gone on, and here it all was, still going on.

She almost did not want to see her friends. For there they would be, unchanged, yet she, changed forever, and they would never know.

She almost did not want to see them, but when they came she was glad. They crowded in by her sides, Harry and Ginny and Ron, two of them in tears and one close to it. Behind their heads, over their shoulders, Hermione could see her parents still sitting at the end of her bed, steadfast, sometimes watching her as if they were afraid she might have disappeared again when they were not looking.

"Oh, Hermione," Ginny was half-gasping. "I'm so glad––so glad..."

Harry shook his head, lips pressed together, his green eyes shining in the late-morning sun. To escape the thought of those other green eyes she would never see again, Hermione looked to Ron, who was pale but grinning unceasingly.

"Knew we wouldn't lose you...knew it...knew you'd pull through..."

"It's so good to see you..." Hermione managed, then gave up and simply pulled them all into a messy, heartfelt embrace.

They looked hardly changed at all, her friends. She could scarcely believe it had been a year since she'd seen them, spoken to them. Perhaps it had all been a nightmare after all, some powerful dreaming draught, a Dark spell...

It felt as if it could be, but she knew it wasn't. She had the mark to prove it, if nothing else, the mark he'd given her. Unless she'd simply been wounded, and her mind had come up with a story for it all...

She shook her head to clear away the confused memories and questions that clamoured for attention in her mind, and focused again on her friends. They were really here. She was really back. She would not think of him––not yet. Not during the day. Not with everyone here.

"These past three months..." Harry was saying. "I could hardly sleep most days..."

"Why?" She looked from face to tearstained face. When they looked startled, she added, "But why the last three months in particular?"

Ginny was staring at her now. Disconcerted, Hermione tried again, "Did they just start looking for me in the last three months?"

"What d'you mean?" Now Ron was staring at her, looking as if he were worried about her state of mind, which was not at all reassuring. "It's not as if you've been gone longer than that."

"Where did you go?" Harry asked, and behind him Hermione could see her parents, listening; they had not asked her yet, had not pressed her to talk.

It would have been difficult enough to explain without this new confusion on her mind. She decided to address that first: "Yes, I have been gone more than three months. Closer to twelve, in fact."

Ron's mouth fell open. Harry looked stunned, and Ginny suddenly anxious.

"Where...what?" Harry tried, again, failing to complete his question. "How...how d'you mean?"

For a moment, Hermione's head hurt, and she was reminded with an aching unpleasantness of the symptoms of her fading. This pain passed, however, and she breathed again.

"I mean that I've been––I was in the past––well, I was in another timeline...for nearly a year. But––but it doesn't seem like that makes sense to you."

Her parents had come forward, her mother looking at her with a deep sadness as she took Hermione's hand.

"You've been gone eleven weeks here. Seventy-nine days, since they let us know."

"But you've been gone longer––in your head?" Her father's hand was crumpling a corner of her covers, his eyes filled with worry.

"Not...not in my head," Hermione tried, suddenly fatigued. "The jar..."

But the pain was returning, and though mild, it brought with it painful memories. She turned away from them reluctantly, eyes shut, Remus' face flashing across her mind, the backs of her eyelids. How she missed him; she ached with the loss of him...

She opened her eyes to find Harry, Ginny and Ron gone, and her parents by her side, with her Healer, Gareth, a short, kindly wizard.

"Hermione? How are you feeling now?"

"Bit of a headache," she said, honestly, though she hated the looks that crossed her parents' faces. "Noth––nothing serious."

"Here," said Gareth, and he handed her a flask of potion. "It's a mild painkiller." He then gave a complicated twirl of his wand that she had gathered by now meant he was talking her vitals. "You're recovering well, in general. Try not to worry about the pain; it's not unusual in those who have returned recently."

 

* * *

 

She spent the rest of the day quietly, with her parents, trying to answer the few questions that they did pose to her. She knew they did not want to tax her with too many, and was grateful for that. Her mind was filled with too much pain and grief and conflicting emotions to manage much else at the moment.

When they had finally left in the evening, after dinner, having finally been convinced she would still be there when they returned the next day, Hermione fell into a fitful sleep. She dreamt of Remus, and awoke in the night, her chest aching with longing. How grateful she was that she was alive, that she had been retrieved in time. And yet––how was she to simply go on? To return to her life as it had been, as if nothing had happened?

A wave of pain and nausea swept through her, and she found she had to make use of the bucket St. Mungo's had set by her bedside. She vanished it afterward, hardly bearing to look at it, the evidence that there was something not quite the same any more; that she was changed, though she was back; that she was not and could never again be the same.

When the pain had passed, she sat up slowly in her bed and looked around. A pale moonlight filtered through the nearest window, lending the hospital room an otherworldly air. How fitting, she thought, for she did now feel out of place, alien, in her own world. The moonlight brought him back to her mind––brought her backward to him––and now she allowed herself to feel it, the aching, yawning loss, now that she was alone. The thought that he was out there––had been––that he had lived his life, or was living it, and yet she would not see him again, would never touch him or hear or smell him again...

Somehow, despite her sorrow, she still felt better now than she had in the daytime, a ghost in those scenes painted with the unreality of sunlight. It felt so distant from her in the daylight, the past year, though she felt now and vowed silently she would never forget how very real it had all been.

_Of course you're feeling like this_ , she told herself. _You came to terms with your death, and now you're back in the sunshine, as if it never happened._

She lay down again reluctantly, drawing the covers up over herself, watching the ceiling of the hospital and remembering the ceiling of her room at the Leaky, the ceiling of the bedroom at Remus' cottage, the ceilingless sky strewn with stars under which the two of them had so often lain. She thought of the Swan, and imagined she could hear once more the distant tune of the song Remus had played for her that evening in the dark, in that long-gone time.

She was loathe to close her eyes, for she knew that she would again feel that deep, burning sorrow when she had to open them again. Nevertheless––she had to sleep. She had to get better; she needed the strength, if only because she knew that after her parents, after Harry and Ron and Ginny, her other friends, too, would come to visit. And that would mean coming face to face with someone she was not sure she could ever bring herself to properly look at again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the long delay – here now is the beginning of the next part of this story! I have been writing over the past months, and am continuing to work on this. Thank you all so much for your kind and touching comments and messages. It is always so meaningful to know that someone might have been moved by my writing.


	15. A Reunion

**December 2000**

She was glad only Harry and Ginny arrived upon the opening of visiting hours.

"We thought it best to give you some space," Ginny was saying. "And you have your parents here..."

"Thank you," she said, sincerely. "I'm glad...but I think I do need some time to..."

Harry and Ginny exchanged a glance. Harry said, "Would you want us to maybe tell the others to hang on a bit? I know some of them really want to come and see you soon, but if you need time, please..."

Though Harry had not specified anyone, had mentioned no names, her heart lurched at the thought that one of these others so keen to see that she was well might be him. Him who she could not bear even to think about. She tried to push the thought away: Harry probably meant Arthur and Molly, or Luna, or T–– or Tonks––

"I know Tonks and Remus were really worried," Ginny told her in a tone that was meant to comfort, but which instead inspired a pit of dread and shame in Hermione's stomach. Her heart had stuttered at the sound of his name.

"But I can tell them––" Harry offered, watching her face.

"Er...yes, perhaps...thank them, please, but I––perhaps another day..."

"No worries," said Harry quickly, understanding perhaps instinctively how she was feeling. Ginny looked more concerned than he did, more anxious about Hermione's plea for solitude. Hermione met Harry's firm gaze, and felt a tenuous relief begin to lodge itself into the upper reaches of her throat.

The morning passed with slow explanation to her parents and to Harry and Ginny of where she had been in the past year––or, for them, the past three months. She left out him, and them, and spoke only of her efforts to seek a return, and of her predicted and eventual fading. It felt like a betrayal not to mention him; a betrayal to not tell the truth, that he had possibly been the reason she had lived as long as she had.

"I can't believe it..." Ginny whispered. "Oh, Hermione. You're so––so strong."

"And––you had no one?" Harry asked, in a somewhat shaky voice. "Because you mustn't be seen, or heard..."

She nodded, closing her eyes briefly, biting back the truths that rose on her tongue. "Yes. There were exceptions, though...I...I had the Ministry there to go to."

"At least," Ginny managed. "At least you had them."

Harry and Ginny took their leave just before lunchtime. Hermione shared a quiet meal with her parents. She felt just a little better, her burden a little lighter, having shared at least part of the truth with them, her friends and her parents. They did not know the most important parts. They never could. But at least she had been able to tell them what else had happened.

Her parents were preparing to leave now, so she could have the afternoon to herself and rest. She felt a tentative happiness alight on her shoulder, light as a butterfly, and, she feared, as fickle. But it stayed as they embraced her, pressed kisses to her forehead and cheeks, as her mother began to leave the room.

Then she heard the quiet conversation just outside the door, conducted for her benefit at a hushed volume:

"Is she asleep?" A woman's voice. It was...

"No, not yet..." Her mother's soft reply.

"How is she? Can we see her?" It was, yes; it was Tonks.

"I could ask her, see how she's feeling."

Then, that soft, hoarse voice, which sent a shiver down through her spine to the very tips of her toes:

"We don't want to disturb her. If she's tired..."

"Let me ask––I'll ask."

Now her mother was coming back to her side, smiling faintly. "Hermione...two of your friends are here, if you'd like to see them. They can always come back again, if you want. You need your rest, but if you want to see them..."

She felt her mouth open. For reasons she would never quite be able to fathom––was it their proximity? His? The inevitability of it all?––she said, "Yes, of course, come, tell them to come in."

Then she could hear the rustle of clothing, of people treading softly as they entered the room. Her chest felt tight and she realised she was holding her breath. She let go of the air in her lungs and tried to draw in some more. She wasn't ready. She couldn't see him, she mustn't. She could smell him, the dear scent of his soap, his cologne, of him.

"Hi," Tonks whispered. Her hair was pink, but softly so, unintrusive.

Behind her––was him. Her husband. Tonks'.

The very air seemed lodged in her throat when Remus came into her vision. There he was: that very same face, that face she knew so well. He had the same eyes, the same lips, the same brow and nose and throat and teeth. He had the very same scar on his throat she had noticed on the younger Remus when they had first met at St. Mungo's. The same quiet smile, and almost––almost––the same affection held for her in those eyes. He was very white, but calm, those eyes upon her, a gaze that weighed on her.

"Hermione," he said, coming forward as well, so that he too was right by her bedside, close enough to touch––too close, then. She could smell him, almost feel his heat. It was unbearable, her need for him. If only she could rise from her bed––walk down this hall, to the last ward––find him there again, young and hers, playing with fire...

"I'm so, so very glad you're safe..."

Tonks reached out to brush a loose curl from Hermione's face. For a moment, she felt she might gather herself. She might pull through; might be able to greet them calmly, make excuses for her tiredness and see them on their way. But Remus reached out, then, just to touch a comforting hand to her shoulder, and the wall she had been so carefully constructing faltered at its foundations. It was not him...he was not...and yet she...

"I'm––" she tried. "It's––" she stopped.

She was weeping once again, and this meant that Remus felt he had to comfort her; but every touch of his was another painful reminder of he who she had left behind. Nevertheless she found that she held onto him, wanted him close, despite the distant knowledge that he was different, and despite the coldness of the gold on his wedding finger. She clung closer to him, breaking, and he held her, gingerly at first and then more firmly, gathering her into strong arms. If he was confused by the strength of her feelings, he did not show it. In any case there was no reason for anyone then present to suspect that the reason for her fresh, aching grief was the man who held her, and not simply everything that she had been through on her journey through worlds.

Remus' embrace of her was warm and tender. But it was foreign; it lacked the intimacy one would give to a lover, the intimacy which had grown so thickly, so indelibly, between Hermione and the younger Remus. In this world, he had not touched her. They had not touched each other. And this, his holding her now, was full of caring, but not enough; always appropriate; and it seemed to break Hermione anew.

She saw his confusion at her reaction to his attempts to comfort; and his confusion at the look in her eyes. She must not give herself away.

She saw, too, in his blue eyes, a devastation for her.

"Oh, Hermione," he whispered. That same hoarse voice, and yet it was not him. "It's alright. It's alright now. You're alright."

 _I'm not_ , she wanted to say.

"It's not fair," was what came out, words strung on a ragged breath.

"It's not," he repeated, though of course he did not truly know what she meant when she said it. No one could know but she herself.

Remus held her and murmured soft words of comfort until the ache of her grief began to subside, and she released her tight grip on him, embarrassed by what had overcome her. Now the rest of the world and those in it slowly filtered back; Tonks, pale and worried beside her husband, and her parents at the back of the room, faces drawn and anxious.

She had not done this even the day before, when her closest friends had come to see her. It would be no surprise if her parents were wondering at what had just passed between her and the man they knew only as her former professor.

Hermione drew back, feeling exhausted and insignificant, wanting badly to pull the covers on her bed up, up, to bury the guilt and sense of shame now multiplying in her gut. She couldn't bring herself to look at him for the moment, nor at Tonks––his wife. His wife.

"Sorry," she tried to say. "Thank you...thank you for coming to see me."

"Of course." His low voice, the kindness in it another sting to her heart.

"Of course...Remus just got back from a mission today and we came right away." Tonks came a little closer, gave her hand a squeeze.

Remus took his wife's other hand in his own, and Hermione's stomach fell; but she had no right, of course. She'd been a fool, an unlucky fool, to have fallen in love as she had.

"You were missed," said Remus. "Greatly."

She had to look away. She couldn't look him in the eye. She could not look at them at all. Every touch of his to his wife––each touch hurt her, though each time her mind raised a feeble, plaintive cry: _You have no right...what were you thinking?_

Remus spoke again. "We'll let you rest." She wondered if she were imagining the thickness in his voice, until he cleared his throat and confirmed it.

"Yes," said Tonks. She gave Hermione's hand a final squeeze, then let go. Remus nodded but did not touch her again before they took their leave. The hospital room seemed much larger once they had gone, as though they––as though he––had crowded all the air out when he had entered.

"Are you alright? Are you feeling any worse?" Her mother, her face drawn, tight with concern. Hermione did feel a little weaker, if lighter, after it all. How affected she had been by him!

But her parents, if they had questions about what had passed, did not ask any. They only made sure she was as comfortable as she could be in the circumstances, and said firmly that they would not allow any more visitors for the day. She had had quite enough for today, said her father, and she wholeheartedly agreed.

For a time since coming to terms with her return she had wrestled with the question of whether there were any reasons or moral compulsion for her to disclose the relationship she had had in that other time, but she had her answer now. She would never tell him, of course, and she would never tell a soul. It would be her cross to bear, and hers alone. Any confession would only bring upheaval to their lives. For if she did admit to it––what was the purpose? Truth for truth's sake? Better that no one knew of it but her; her secret to keep to the grave. And if it hurt, this keeping of it in her soul, she had no one to blame but herself.

Did she not owe it to him, the truth?

No, for he was not him. He wasn't.

In the evening she found herself staring into the bathroom mirror long after she had finished brushing her teeth. She looked the same, at least to herself. The same hair, if a little longer. The same eyes, if a little older. The same shoulders and breasts and belly. Outwardly there was nothing different about her, except for the mark he had left her where shoulder joined neck. She raised a hand to feel it. It was not warm now, and had not been since her return. She had taken to brushing it unconsciously, as though her body remembered the heat and now mourned its loss.

Outwardly she simply looked tired; inside she felt distinctly different, forever changed.


	16. Blue Ink

**December 2000**

"There are other things we can do."

Hermione watched the enchanted snowglobe that was revolving gently on the corner of the specialist Healer's desk. Mark was a slight man, dark-featured, and he'd known Amelia, had in fact trained under her.

"What do you mean?"

"Some people..." He paused. "Some people find it helps them to heal and return more fully to the present if they carry out some adjustments to their memories."

"You mean you'll wipe my memory."

"Yes––in a way. We can remove the memories from that period of time. We can––if that is what you choose."

Again a choice for her to make. This time not to choose to live, but to choose to forget that she had lived.

"No."

He was watching her watch the snowglobe, the white-dusted roofs of the miniature world inside it. "You should take your time to think about it. It's often a very difficult and painful decision, and a very private one."

They were playing now, those memories whose very existence was being threatened, projected in the private theatre of her mind. His laughter, the wind in his sun-lightened hair, his quiet glances at her from across a room. The cottage, the forest around it, the path through the garden. His arms around her and the whisper of her name.

Could she forget him? Could she give all this up, him, them, a very part of herself? For what?

"No, I don't want to forget... I don't want to forget."

"If you change your mind, you––"

"I won't," she assured him, though even as she spoke, she knew that the idea of it would linger, would tease and torment her. For it would be easier, less painful, for her to forget. To look at Remus here and see nothing again, or simply what she saw before: no one but a friend. To forget and forget until it was all a distant, once-remembered dream, and she would only wonder at how she had acquired that faint silvery mark upon her shoulder. Yes, it would be easier to forget.

"Alright," Mark said gently. "You can always come and see me again if you have any questions, Hermione."

She thought, from the way he spoke, that he was not at all convinced by her answer. The snowglobe on his desk continued to rotate; a fine, tiny snow had begun to fall, powdering the whole world contained within the glass. A lump had risen in her throat.

"Thank you," she said.

 

* * *

 

"Won't you reconsider?" Her mother's voice had been pleading, wheedling. "Even just for a couple of days?"

It was a few days until Christmas, and earlier in the day Hermione had been deemed well enough to be discharged from St. Mungo's. She wanted to leave. She needed to. She needed to be somewhere she could be alone, her mind to herself for hours at a time, until she could make sense of all that had happened within the past week. Part of her longed for the comfort that going home with her parents would bring, yet another part of her strained for space.

For space––but not for solitude. For she knew she was not rid of him yet, and did not want to be. The ghost of his touch and his presence remained with her, and it was for this that she needed space. To be by herself, and yet also, somehow, to be with him.

_I could forget him_ , she thought, once she had arrived back in her flat. _I have that choice_.

She shut the door behind her, and did not yet look around, to see how everything here, too, had stayed the same. Instead she opened the bag her parents had given to her at the hospital. Her hands worked automatically, unpacking her few belongings, clothes. She reached for the clothes, her clothes, the clothes they'd brought back with her from the other world. Her jeans, her jumper, her coat. Her heart constricted thinking of how it had all happened. Had it been him––had he pressed her things into the arms of the Unspeakables as they carried her away? Had they simply collected things of hers as they took her? Had they even spoken to him?

Hermione dashed a hand against her cheek, angry with herself for the fresh tears, angry with the fates for all that had happened. She removed the new coat her parents had brought her and put on the old one. She couldn't smell him on it. It was just another of her coats, in the end.

_What did you think? What did you think would happen?_

He was gone, gone, gone forever. Her scar was cold and would remain so for the rest of her days. Why not, indeed, forget him? It would do her good...she could move on. It was the right choice, in many ways. The sensible one.

Hermione slipped a hand into her pocket and felt her fingers brush parchment. Hardly thinking, she slipped it out, a corner of brown parchment torn from some larger piece, tightly folded.

She did not understand it yet, but her hands began to tremble as she stared down at it. Slowly, too slowly, she struggled to unfold it, to open it and smooth it flat enough to read. The blue ink caught her heart in its grip and made her breath hitch.

_Dear Hermione,_

She unfolded the parchment with shaking hands, catching the corners, crumpling them. The room was blurry; in that instant her eyes had filled with tears. Her legs felt too weak to support her and she sank slowly to the floor, back pressed against the cool, hard surface of the locked door. Fumbling for the parchment, she opened it again, stretching it tight so that the creases pulled taut.

_Dear Hermione,_

_My dearest Hermione._

_How can I fit a lifetime into a few words?_

_I love you._

_I always will._

_R_

They were his words, written in his hand, hurried but sure. His words and his love, borne by the scrap of parchment across countless twisting threads of time and space. If anything had begun to fade from her mind, if it had started to feel more and more like a dream, this was her souvenir of that strange and distant world, her incontrovertible proof that it had all really happened, after all.

_I love you_ , she thought, desperately, fiercely, angrily. Her face was wet with tears. _I love you. I love you._

_I love you._

Would it be worth it, to forget him? How could she bear it, giving up him and them and their time? No, she couldn't; no, it couldn't be worth it. She would not give him up, or their memories. She would remember him, and wanted to, for as long as she could.

And yet she knew, too, that she could not live in the past. She could not dwell within those memories. She would not forget, but she needed to go on.


	17. Unseen

**January 2001**

"Only if you're ready. Only if you want to."

"I..."

"I'm still so happy they found you. So happy," Ginny repeated, dashing the back of a wrist across her cheek. "We all are, so glad."

"But it still doesn't mean you need to come to dinner yet." Harry met her eyes steadily. "It was just an idea."

"Thanks, Harry." Hermione fell silent for a long moment, staring into the depths of her mug. Eventually she said, "I'll come. I miss everyone, too." She did; all of them, the Weasleys, and their friends who joined their dinners at The Burrow from time to time, Luna, Neville––Tonks, and Remus. All of them.

For a moment she wanted to ask who would be coming this week––to test whether she could weather better the sound of his name––but the words did not reach her lips. Instead she said, once more, "I'll come."

On the evening of the dinner Hermione put on a dress she had not touched for a year, and tried not to look at the pair of shoes she had put away in a corner of the wardrobe; the shoes she'd worn to that world and back. She should get rid of them, she thought, for even if she tried not to look she still saw them, and still thought the thoughts that they elicited. Thoughts of then; thoughts of him.

He could be there tonight, she knew. She had tried to prepare herself for it. Surely it would not be this hard forever. Surely time would heal the same wounds it had inflicted upon her.

Harry and Ginny met her outside the house, so that they could be beside her as she walked in. She was grateful for it, watching her two friends as they hung up their cloaks in the hall. A few feet away, the door to the living room was ajar, and she could hear the murmur of conversation, though she could not yet see into the warmly-lit, familiar room.

Molly came out of the kitchen, then, and came over to give Hermione a tight embrace.

"Hello, dear," she said, not quite entirely letting go. "I'm so very, very glad to see you here, dear."

"Thank you," said Hermione.

"You're a little early," Molly continued, turning now to hug her daughter and then Harry. "Go on ahead and join the rest of them in there, until it's time to eat."

Ginny gave Hermione a bracing smile, then tucked an arm through hers as Harry headed toward the living room. Hermione's eyes caught on details as they followed him in. She had not been here for a year; she had not been here since before it all. It was all much the same, which at once comforted and unsettled her. There was comfort in the sameness; perhaps she could pretend that not much had changed, after all. And yet it was painful to know again the truth––that she had changed, and would remain so, even if outside of her the world had gone on just as usual.

She would remain changed, unless... There was that option. But she had decided that it would not be worth it, to forget him.

_I love you._

The living room materialised around her as she and Ginny entered. The fireplace, the familiar old clock, the same worn bookshelves and muggle knickknacks, the same squashy old sofa and armchairs. And the same people there amongst everything: Percy, who nodded at her. Bill and Fleur, giving her smiles of welcome and condolence. Ron and George huddled in a corner near the fire, muttering over the latest products from the shop. She saw, with an almost painful clench of relief, that Tonks and Remus did not seem to be amongst them.

But she had relaxed too soon; for Harry had ventured further into the room, and now beside him, in familiar deep green robes, was Remus.

Remus, who was smiling at Harry, but who now looked up and directed that same smile at her.

At the same time, Ginny left her side, drawn across the room into some dispute with her brothers. And so Hermione had to go to them, Harry and Remus; she forced her feet to move, to carry her over to the two men.

"Hermione," he said.

_My dearest Hermione._

He was giving her a hug now. A quick one; two pats of his hand upon her shoulder. Warm. Kind. As he always was, here.

The distance in it killed her.

The same distance yawned between them as they sat down, Remus in the old maroon armchair, Harry and Hermione on the sofa adjacent. She felt it stretch between them, that distance, every inch an endless, impenetrable year. It was there between them and written on his face, the lack of knowing in his eyes, the threads of silver in his hair.

He was perceptive, more so than anyone she knew, but she knew also that even he could not sense what she so desperately held within her. Not even he could perceive what had happened a world away.

"How are you feeling these days?"

He spoke quietly, kindly. She watched how he sat there in the armchair, so much the same, so irretrievably different. She had traced the bridge of that nose; she knew the feeling of those scars beneath her fingertips. That world had been different, but she saw now how it had also been the very same.

The years had aged him; the age had refined him. There were lines now where there had been none, but she needed to remind herself that she was not looking at _him_ , her Remus, older; no, she was looking at him before her, at the older Remus who did not belong to her, who never had.

She felt her eyes settle on his hand where it rested upon his thigh. It was safer here, she thought, where she did not have to meet that gaze she knew too well. But still her mind filled with the memories of how she had once held that hand; how those fingers had once touched her and traced her features.

_No_ , she reminded herself. _Not this hand._

"I'm feeling better."

She gave him a soft smile, the best she could do. Remus returned it, so that she had to look away again after a beat, hoping he would not find her behaviour strange.

"Your headaches are gone?" Harry asked. They had caught up recently, she and Harry. Harry and Ginny were amongst her greatest supports these days. It did not soothe the absence of Remus from her life, but she was grateful for it nonetheless. She was grateful now, for Harry's presence, so that she could turn a little toward him and away from Remus, away from those eyes she could feel upon her.

When it was time to eat, they stood and began to make their way to the dining room. Remus was behind her; she was much too conscious of it. She worried, too, that he would sit beside her. She did not know if she could bear it.

_But I must_ , she thought. _I must._

Part of her wished Tonks would join them soon; perhaps it would be easier, if it became clear that this world was a different one, and Remus was not now and had never been hers. But another part of her knew that it would tear her apart. It was still painful, try as she might to fight these feelings, to keep her jaw set. She knew it, she told it to herself often, but still her heart faltered with each reminder. Here he was a married man, married to her friend. He was not him.

Hermione sat down in the chair beside Harry's. Remus took the chair on her other side. Her heart was beating a little too quickly now. Harry was saying something to Ginny; he was not looking at Hermione then. Of course Remus would notice, would keep his attention on her, not wanting her to feel alone.

"It must be strange to be here," he said. His chair was too close to hers; there were too many of them packed around the table. His left hand on the tabletop drew her attention now, with its too-gold ring. "Sometimes when I returned from my missions with packs...it was hard to feel myself again. As if I were entering an old world, from a past life."

How much had happened in the years that had passed? If things were as similar here and in the other world as they had been in the past, then the Remus she'd known, her Remus, might have been through the same things as this man before her. All the heartache and the pain he had faced––all the pain.

"It's not the same," Remus was saying, quickly. "I know that." Perhaps she had been silent for too long, long enough that he thought she objected to his attempt to connect.

"I know what you mean," she brought herself to say, somewhat haltingly. "It is...it is strange. And...difficult. I was there for a year...even if only weeks, here..."

"Yes." His light eyes held hers; and she let them, tired of fighting it, the yearning that rose within her. "You had...a life there."

_How can I fit a lifetime into a few words?_

It took her breath away for an instant, the memory of blue ink on crumpled parchment. His love for her, from a world away.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."


End file.
